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 well into its second decade. After seven years at Cornell, the Cloud Forum took to the road. The 13th annual Cloud Forum will take place on the beautiful Grounds of the University of Virginia May 25-27, 2027.
Perhaps third time will be the charm, we have every hope that the 2028 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
The Cloud Forum is a single-track event. Its intimate setting, paired with higher ed IT’s tradition of open sharing, makes for conversations that are candid, productive, often genuinely entertaining, and always worth your time. Attendees swap successes, failures, and hard-won lessons, floating new ideas along the way. We put our toughest problems in front of our peers, counting on the collective wisdom of the group to help solve them.
The program blends presentations, panels, lightning talks, and research talks from faculty and IT professionals working across the major cloud platforms. A half-day unconference joined the lineup in 2019, and a workshop followed in 2021. The 2026 workshop harnessed the resident brainpower to develop a higher ed cloud maturity model. The organizing committee continually refreshes the agenda to track the issues that matter most right now. The community and its priorities steer the conversation.
“This is the best conference dedicated to Cloud management and strategy. The information gained and connections made during the conference are invaluable whether you are new to Cloud management and strategy or have been doing it for many years.” – David Lacey, J Paul Getty Trust
Attendance
The Cloud Forum is designed to bring together CIOs, directors of infrastructure, and cloud enablement leaders and architects. Attendees consistently point to the event’s small scale and candid discussions as its biggest draw. Participation is open to staff, faculty, and – with approval – students from research and education institutions, plus a small number of industry guests invited by the organizing committee. Everything happens in a single room, keeping discussion and networking tight-knit. To make room for as many institutions as possible, each one may send up to three attendees. Institutions just starting their cloud journey are especially encouraged to join. They are sure to come away with more than just a notebook full of ideas and solutions, they will also have a new network of professionals and friends to help their cloud journey.