The Cloud Forum

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 a decade old. In 2022 we took the Forum on the road and in 2025 we will visit New York University. We are excited to be in the Big Apple. There is talk of a real NY culinary experience (read: bagels and pizza). More campuses have an opportunity to showcase their institutions by hosting it. By moving it around the country, we also make it easier for more and 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. What innovation will the organizing committee come up with for 2025?

Attendance

The target audience for the Cloud Forum are CIOs, directors of infrastructure, and, of course, cloud enablement leadership and architects. Participants regularly identify the 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 invited guests. The 2025 Cloud Forum venue will limit attendance to 120 participants. 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.