Convening the Research and Higher Education Cloud Community
The Higher Education Cloud Forum is a gathering for higher education IT professionals to discuss the challenges, potential, and best practices for using hyper-scale computing tools and platforms to support enterprise computing, and academic research, as well as teaching and learning. The event is organized by members of the higher education cloud community for their peers in the higher education community.
Launched at Cornell University in 2015, the Cloud Forum is now entering its second decade. In 2022, we took the Forum on the road. The 12th annual Cloud Forum will be hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2026. The 2027 Cloud Forum will be at the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. By moving the Cloud Forum around the country, more campuses have an opportunity to showcase their institutions by hosting it, and it makes it easier for more institutions to attend.
The Cloud Forum Experience
Thanks to its intimate setting and higher education IT’s history of open sharing, the conversations at the Cloud Forum are candid, productive, often quite entertaining, and always informative. We share successes, failures, and lessons learned and float new ideas. We challenge our peers with the problems we are facing in hopes of tapping into the wisdom of the group.
The Forum consists of presentations, panels, lightning talks, and research presentations by faculty working on the major cloud platforms. In 2019 we added a half-day unconference and in 2021 a workshop. In 2024 the community nominated the research presenters. The organizing committee is always working to keep it current, reflecting the top issues faced by the community. The community and its priorities drive the conversation.
Attendance
The target audience for the Cloud Forum is CIOs, directors of infrastructure, and, of course, cloud enablement leadership and architects. Participants regularly identify the Cloud Forum’s limited size and frank discussions it facilitates as core benefits of the event. Attendance is limited to staff, faculty, and, with approval, students from research and education institutions as well as a few select guests, invited by the organizing committee. The Cloud Forum takes place in a single room to facilitate active discussion and networking. To accommodate as many institutions as possible, each institution may send no more than three attendees. We strongly encourage attendance by institutions early in their cloud journey.