May 10-12 2023 | Community Exchange & Emory University in Atlanta, GA

The Cloud Forum

Join us for the Higher Education Cloud Forum from
May 10-12, 2023 at the Community Exchange and at Emory University in Atlanta, GA.

Register for Cloud Forum 2023

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 created by higher ed, for higher ed.

The 2022 Cloud Forum represented both a new chapter for this annual event and a return to its roots. After being hosted by Cornell University since its inception in 2015, the Cloud Forum went on the road to Washington University in St. Louis. The Forum remains an event coordinated by the higher education community for the higher education community and now more campuses will have an opportunity to host it.

Cloud Forum Shifts to Spring in 2023

In keeping with the agile and responsive history of the Cloud Forum, the event is moving to spring at the community’s request. This will pull the event out of the scrum of fall higher ed technical conferences. Due to the short turn-around, the 2023 Cloud Forum will be held in conjunction with the Internet2 Community Exchange. In addition to Cloud content in the Community Exchange schedule, there will be a stand-alone Cloud Forum day on the campus of Emory University.

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 researchers working on the major cloud platforms. In 2019 we added a half-day unconference. We took it all virtual in 2020 and the 2021 event included a deeper dive workshop on an important emerging strategic theme. The pivot to spring in 2023 may abbreviate the range of sessions we hold, but the sharing of ideas and personal connections will remain the real power of the event.

Cloud Forum logo

The Cloud Forum is on the Move!
Cloud Forum 2022 Group Photo in front of the Knight Center on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis
Washington University in St. Louis welcomed cloud professionals from 47 different organizations for the 2022 Cloud Forum. The packed agenda of presentations, panels, lightning and research talks generated two and a half days of candid sharing of the challenges and successes with implementing, managing and supporting hyper-scale technology in higher education.

With the successful Cloud Forum at Washington University, this unique higher education event is now fully road tested and on the move. In response to community concerns about a packed technology event calendar, the Cloud Forum is moving from the fall to the spring. With so much going on in higher ed cloud, our planning committee was unwilling to bypass 2023. Consequently, the 2023 Cloud Forum will partner with the Internet2 Community Exchange, sharing some content and logistics. The Cloud Forum will culminate with a dedicated day on the campus of Emory University. We have begun talks about 2024. How about on your campus?

Read more about the move and how you can host a future Cloud Forum->
Photo of auditorium in Convocation Hall at Emory University

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 restricted to staff, faculty, and with approval, students from institutions of higher education as well as invited guests. The in-person Cloud Forum venue will be limited to 84 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.

Cloud Forum 2023

In order to ease the transition from a fall to a spring event, the 2023 Cloud Forum will take place in conjunction with the Internet2 Community Exchange which takes place in Atlanta from May 8-11. Cloud Forum events begin with a reception the evening of May 10 and then move to Convocation Hall on the campus of Emory University before returning to the conference hotel on Friday, May 12 for some cross-institutional team building with an AWS GameDay competition. The Call for Proposals for Cloud Forum 2023 is now closed.

Cloud Forum Timeline

  • Call for Proposals Opens: December 26
  • Call for Proposals Closes: January 31
  • Registration Opens: February 6
  • Speaker Notifications: February 27
  • Schedule Posted: March 7
  • Cloud Forum Convenes: May 10-12