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 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.