What is the difference between a ‘cloud’ and an ‘online platform’?

Answer

Dear Sarah,

for the most part, that’s probably marketing. Cloud simply sounds a bit sexier than an online platform and you could say that it is a kind of branding.

If we look at it strictly, the online platforms are a subset of the concept of cloud. Additional features that you can have in a cloud application and not necessarily in an online platform are

• scalability and pay per use: a cloud platform can expand or contract according to usage. In a period when you need a lot of capacity (eg ticket sales for Tomorrowland), more server power and network is used. And when it is quiet, less is used.
  In a good contract you will even have to pay depending on the server power that is used.
• the physical location of the cloud service can change without you knowing, needing or wanting to know. It may even be perfect for it to be split over several servers.
• Virtualization: the application shares a hardware platform with other (cloud) services without those services being able to harass each other or know of each other’s existence, while still running on the same physical hardware. You often see something like this, but not always with online platforms.

Of course, each of these features can also be used in an online platform without calling themselves ‘cloud’. So it’s definitely not black and white.

In addition, it is also true that cloud may have more guises than just “an online platform”. Typically cloud is that we talk about “service”, and this can vary from Software As A Service (full applications in the cloud) (SAAS) to Platform As A Service (server capacity with pre-installed Operating System and a number of basic services) (PAAS ) to Infrastructure As A Server (IAAS) – just the server capacity.

An online platform is usually under SaaS, but as we said it is certainly not a hard and fast rule. In short, many gray zones and many common features between Cloud and online platform. The fact is that Cloud should always be online and so should an online platform.