What is GIS in the cloud?

Cloud in GIS means geographic data, services, and applications run on remote servers and are reachable via the internet, instead of on local machines or owned data centers. Think SaaS platforms such as GeoApps, ArcGIS Online, or hosted WMS/WFS.

Benefits: scalability, lower initial infrastructure, faster updates, access from anywhere. Considerations: latency, vendor lock-in, data location (EU), and dependence on network and SLA.

Cloud GIS is not synonymous with "data in the cloud" alone. It covers compute, hosting, identity, APIs, and sometimes managed databases — the full chain from source to browser.