By
Bob Flynn - Senior Program Manager, Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
It’s that time of year again — we are excited to announce that the Higher Education Cloud Forum 2026 Call for Proposals is now officially open.
The Cloud Forum —organized for and by higher education professionals — will be hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison from May 19-21, 2026, and is the premier gathering dedicated to discussions on the strategic, efficient, and effective use of hyperscale technologies in research and education (R&E).
It is a limited-capacity, no-cost event for the R&E community. Most meals are provided, so participants only need to cover their travel costs.
A dedicated committee of your peers has been hard at work to bring you another great Cloud Forum in 2026, and we want you to be a part of it.
Submit Your Cloud Proposals
Are you building out AI-powered tools for the students on Google Cloud? Have you started migrating your VMs from on-premises to AWS? Have you brought the cloud in-house by setting up an Azure Local in your data center? Have you migrated your ERP infrastructure to OCI?
If so, your peers in R&E want to hear about it.
The Cloud Forum 2026 Call for Proposals is now officially open through Friday, Dec. 15. We welcome proposals for presentations from across the R&E community.
We are accepting proposals for:
- Presentations
- Panel discussions
- Lightning talks
Share your stories. Share your lessons. Share your failures. Share your successes.
We welcome any topic you want to propose, but some trending topic areas you might consider include:
- Research work enabled by hyperscale technologies
- Multi-cloud management (tools, strategies, staffing, etc.)
- Building from FinOps to CloudOps and the role of governance in account provisioning
- Configuration and management of controlled data environments (CMMC, GovCloud, etc.)
- The role of cloud in responding to campus and research demands for Generative AI tools
- Staffing, training, and cross-organizational collaboration challenges
- Supporting the use of cloud for research and teaching
- Successes, challenges, and failures when working with external contractors and cloud vendors
- Enhancing cloud security and visibility across your multi-cloud estate
- Interoperability of multiple cloud solutions
Are you having trouble deciding which proposal to submit? We are accepting multiple proposals from interested Cloud Forum 2026 participants.
For full details, including eligibility guidelines, visit the Cloud Forum 2026 Call for Proposals page.
Reach Out to Your Researchers
Sometimes, technological limitations constrain researchers’ ability to fully realize their ideas. They have to adjust their problem to fit the boxes that are built for them.
However, the right technology often enables researchers to move forward in ways we could not have imagined.
A longstanding Cloud Forum tradition is to feature presentations from researchers who utilize hyperscale technologies to power their work.
Do you have faculty at your institution leveraging the cloud for vital research? Please ask them to consider submitting a proposal.
Complete Cloud Forum Timeline
- Call for Proposals Opens: Monday, Nov. 3, 2025
- Call for Proposals Closes: Monday, Dec. 15, 2025
- Speaker Notification: Monday, Jan. 19, 2026
- Speaker Response Deadline: Friday, Jan. 30, 2026
- Full Schedule Posted: Monday, Feb. 16, 2026
- Registration Opens: Monday, Feb. 16, 2026
- Cloud Forum Convenes: May 19-21, 2026
Questions?
If you have any questions about the Cloud Forum, please reach out to the 2026 Cloud Forum Organizing Committee chair Bob Flynn. If Bob can’t answer your questions, he’ll point you to the person who can.
About the Author(s)
Bob Flynn is the Sr. PM of Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services at Internet2. He joined Internet2 after nearly 25 years service at Indiana University. For years Bob has helped the higher education community explore, understand, and implement cloud-based hyper-scale technologies and innovations in support of their institutions’ academic and research missions. He manages the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program (CICP) and the Cloud Learning and Skills Sessions (CLASS) programs. His current focus is finding new ways to bring the community together to excel in their use of cloud technologies, wherever they may find them.