April 30 – May 2, 2024 | Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA

The Cloud Forum

Join us for the Higher Education Cloud Forum from
April 30 to May 2, 2024 at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA

For Higher Ed,
By Higher Ed

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 2024 location and dates announced

Mark your calendars! The 2024 Cloud Forum will be held on the campus of Stanford University from April 30 to May 2, 2024. Planning for the event will begin in June 2023. If you wish to be a part of the planning committee, please contact Bob Flynn at Internet2.

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. After an abbreviated Cloud Forum in 2023 necessitated by our quick pivot to spring, the 2024 Cloud Forum will come back as a full 2.5-day event with a wide variety of formats and topics.

Cloud Forum logo

The Spring just got Cloudier
Cloud Forum 2023 in session at Convocation Hall, Emory University
The higher education cloud community visited Convocation Hall on the beautiful campus of Emory University for the 2023 Cloud Forum. Coming only six months after the highly successful 2022 Cloud Forum, the pressure was on. Our presenters and our Emory hosts did not disappoint. Please review the great work presented at the 2023 Cloud Forum.

Dates have been announced for the 2024 Cloud Forum. We will convene April 30 to May 2, 2024 at the Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center on the campus of Stanford University. This will be a full 2.5-day Cloud Forum with presentations, lightning talks, panels, unconference, etc. Watch for the release of the timeline for the call for proposals, registration, etc.

Want to bring the Cloud Forum to your campus in 2025? Read about hosting the Cloud Forum.
Cloud Forum 2024 host Stanford University
Photo of Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center at Stanford 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 Timeline

  • Call for Proposals Opens: October 16, 2023
  • Call for Proposals Closes: November 27, 2023
  • Speaker Notification: January 2, 2024
  • Schedule Posted: February 1, 2024
  • Registration Opens: February 1, 2024
  • Cloud Forum Convenes: April 30 – May 2, 2024