 Hello, and welcome to this session in which we will keep discussing the concept of cloud computing. In the prior session, we discuss what is cloud computing. We discuss the specific services such as SAS or S-A-A-S, P-A-A-S, and I-A-A-S. In this session, we would look at the cloud deployment models, which we have three of them, public, private, and hybrid. We also discuss the pros of the cloud computing, the benefits. And for everything, there's pros and there are cons, and the risks of cloud computing. What are the risks? What are we exposed to when we use cloud computing? So we're going to go ahead and get started discussing the cloud computing models. Before we proceed any further, I have a public announcement about my company, Farhat Lectures dot com. Farhat Accounting Lectures is a supplemental educational tool that's going to help you with your CPA exam preparation, as well as your accounting courses. My CPA material is aligned with your CPA review course such as Becker, Roger, Wiley, Gleam, Miles. My accounting courses are aligned with your accounting courses, broken down by chapter and topics. My resources consist of lectures, multiple choice questions, true-false questions, as well as exercises. Go ahead, start your free trial today. No obligation, no credit card required. So what is the cloud computing models? It means how do we use the resources of the cloud computing? How do we consume those resources? There are different ways that we can consume them. The first one, or use them, is what's called the public cloud. What is the public cloud? Well, from the word public, it means it's available for everyone. Public means available for everyone. Refer to when resources and services are made available over the internet to anyone who wants to use them. It means if you have internet access, you can use them. You have your information in that public cloud. So there's the cloud here. You have your information there, and others will have their information on the same cloud. So the cloud is shared by other people. It's not specific to you. So public clouds are owned and operated by third companies like Amazon Web Services is a public cloud. For example, I could have my data. You could also, if you're listening to me, you could have a cloud service using AWS. Same with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. What are the benefits of public cloud? It's scalable. If I want more space, I can ask Amazon to provide more space, and I will pay more. It's as simple as that. If you want more space, they will provide more space. They are responsible for the technology. In public cloud, the infrastructure is handled by Microsoft Azure or handled by AWS or handled by Google Cloud Platform. All what you do is you rent that space and you can expand or you can downgrade if you choose to. The private cloud is a little bit different. The deployment referred to when services are deployed within the company's own infrastructure. So here is you build the cloud yourself. And that cloud is only available to your organization. So now you have to spend the money. You have to build the cloud yourself. And it's not shared by anyone else. Now, you can manage this cloud either in-house, you can have people managing the cloud yourself, or you can ask a third party, for example, Dell to build the cloud and manage it for you. But it's your infrastructure. You're not renting the space. Now, why would you do that? Why would you have your own private cloud? Well, you could have special need or special use. That's one reason for using the private cloud is your data is a little bit unique. You want it to sync properly. There are special need or special use. In other words, the public clouds don't provide the service that you want. Or you don't want it to be shared. You don't want your data to be shared with others on the same cloud, maybe just for any reason, for privacy, for whatever reason that is. So those are two reasons why you would use a private cloud. There's also the hybrid cloud and the hybrid cloud is a combination of the public and the private. So why would you do that? Well, you want to get the benefit for both. For example, certain data, you have special need for them, or you are more comfortable having them on your own cloud. And other data, you don't care. You don't care if they are on the public cloud. Also, sometime you may run out of capacity, then you want to go to the public cloud. So you have a private cloud that you have, you went over capacity, you want extra space, so you'll go private. So you have a public and a private, and this is what a hybrid cloud is. So it allows you to use the benefit of both deployment model and to move workload between them as needed in terms of capacity. Now, let's talk about the benefits of cloud computing. What are the benefits of cloud computing? The first benefit we talked about very much in the prior session is cost saving. Remember, when you use the cloud, whether for software, development, or infrastructure, you're paying fraction of the cost. You are not making those investments. So cloud based computing allow organization to reduce cost of IT infrastructure and operation as you don't need to invest in hardware and software. Why? Because you are renting. That's one benefit. Two is a scalability and that's a big benefit for a big pro for cloud computing. It means you can easily scale up or scale down. So if you are storing your information and there's more need to store, you could just ask for more storage without, you know, buying expensive additional hardware, same thing with your operation. If your operation expanded, you can expand easily by buying more computing power. And at the same time, if your business is going down south and it's going downhill and you need to downgrade, you could also scale down. So you can scale up and scale down real easily. You don't have to worry about all these infrastructure. Two, accessibility. Well, guess what? You can access your data from anywhere on the internet. For example, I can access my Google documents from anywhere from my phone as long as I have internet. It allow for remote work and collaboration. So you could have people working at their home and accessing the data. Flexibility. Cloud-based system can be customized to meet the specific need of an organization. So even if you have specific need, you can customize that need. And automatic update. You don't have to worry about updating the technology, the infrastructure, because you outsource this to what? To a company that does this on a day-to-day basis. And that's why they charge you a fraction of the cost, because that's their specialty and they can sell it to many people. Therefore, they can contain or they can absorb the update cost to have the latest version. That's good. Data bake backup. Cloud-based system offer the ability to backup data automatically reducing the risk of data loss. Now, the assumption is also that cloud computing, they might have some sort of a backup as well. So they worry about this backup and you hope that their backup system is better than what you would offer yourself as a backup. Improve collaboration. As we said, once your data is in the cloud, many people can work on it remotely, share documents, see what's going on, improve collaboration and communication. And eight, it improve disaster recovery. So cloud computing based can be quickly can quickly recover data and IT system in an event of a disaster. So if it's in the cloud and maybe they have a backup for that cloud, so if one cloud went down, the other one will become available, which is called disaster recovery. It means although something happened, you lost the data, but they can bring it back to life from another server. That's what they do. Now, there are always risks for cloud-based computing, just like for everything, there's pros and there's cons. The first one, obviously, you might guess it, security. Well, cloud-based systems store sensitive data on remote servers. Well, in remote servers, just like any server, it could be subject to cyber attacks, hacking and data breaches. That's one thing. Two, we talked about they can back up the data, but also they can lose the data. So cloud computing system can experience data loss due to hardware failures, power outage or software bugs. Now again, when you're buying your cloud, you have to ask the provider what features do you have and you have to be comfortable. You can never eliminate the risk 100 percent, whether you have the data or they have the data, but you can manage that risk and minimize it to an acceptable level. Compliance risk. Well, you want to make sure your cloud provider is complying with certain regulation and industry standard. For example, HIPAA, health insurance or if you have banking information, because you could be putting the organization at risk of penalties or fine in case you are not complying. You want to make sure you means the provider because you are giving your data to the provider. Also, the cloud-based computing could have a downtime. For example, they are making an update. They could experience some downtime, disrupt under business operation. And as a result, you could have financial losses because you cannot access your data during that downtime. Dependence on third parties. How comfortable are you in depending on third parties? Why? Because availability and security, you're basically trusting them. You're giving them this data to save, store for you and make it available for you. But how comfortable are you with that company? Because the data can be risk, can be at risk of losses, can be risk of data breaches. So you want to trust. So there is that dependence. And a lot of people are not comfortable with being dependent on a third party. Limited control. Well, since you are renting, whatever they have is what they have. So you cannot customize your need. And if you need to customize your need, you may want to move to a private cloud computing. But cloud-based, cloud-based system may limit on organization control over data and infrastructure in terms of special needs, special use, so on and so forth. So those are some of the risks. But definitely, in my opinion, cloud computing benefits will definitely outweigh the risks because those risks, those all these risks, most of them you cannot eliminate even if you have the data internally. From a cost and scalability perspective, I always believe it's worth using cloud-based computing. What should you do now? Go to Farhat Lectures and look at additional MCQs to help you understand these topics. Whether you are a CPA candidate, a CMA candidate, CISA or studying for your accounting information system, understanding cloud computing, or even as a user, is important for you. Good luck, everyone. Study hard. And of course, stay safe.