Traditional EDI meant buying translation software, installing it on company servers, and maintaining maps, connections and upgrades in-house. With cloud EDI, the provider hosts and operates the platform. You connect your ERP and your trading partners to it, and the provider handles infrastructure, updates and often monitoring. Pricing is usually by subscription and volume rather than up-front licenses.
Most cloud EDI is SaaS: many customers share one platform, with their data logically separated. That keeps costs down and makes updates automatic. Some organizations can’t use a shared platform because regulation, security policy or data-sovereignty rules require applications and data to stay within their own cloud, as is common in defense. For them, BYOC (bring your own cloud) fits better. See BYOC vs SaaS.
Moving EDI to the cloud changes who runs the infrastructure, not the work of the trading partner program itself. Maps, onboarding, testing and exception handling still need an owner, either your team or a managed EDI provider. A cloud platform that also handles non-EDI trading partners avoids running a second, manual process alongside it.