Cloud Is Maturing. The Community Is Too.

By Bob Flynn - Senior Program Manager, Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services

2026 Higher Education Cloud Forum Recap

“Every year I walk away with at least one idea I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else – not from a vendor, not from a conference keynote, but from a peer who’s already been through it.”

Rob Larmon, Associate Director for Enterprise Platforms, University of Virginia

Held May 19-21 in Madison, Wisconsin, the 2026 Higher Education Cloud Forum brought together cloud leaders, architects, practitioners, and partners from across research and education (R&E) for three days of peer exchange.

As in past years, the Higher Education Cloud Forum paired presentations, panels, working sessions, and informal discussion with an agenda reflecting timely topics among higher education cloud teams. The conversations made one thing clear: The question is no longer if cloud matters to institutions, but how institutions are using cloud day to day.

AI in Production, FinOps Still Lagging, Cloud Strategy Maturing

Each year, in advance of the Cloud Forum, a State of the Cloud survey is sent to the R&E cloud community and presented at the opening of the Cloud Forum to level set the conversation. The 2026 survey revealed a few trends that also surfaced in panel discussions and hallway conversations throughout this year’s Forum.

The number of institutions moving generative AI into production nearly doubled, and two-thirds of respondents report no dedicated FinOps staff, which could lead to institutions running AI in production without the cost discipline to sustain it.

On the positive side, our collective cloud IQ is on the rise. In previous years’ surveys, many institutions indicated an “Opportunistic Cloud” strategy, meaning cloud is leveraged on an ad hoc basis rather than part of a more comprehensive plan. Half of this year’s respondents selected a “Cloud Smart” strategy, emphasizing business outcomes, security, staffing, and efficiency over broad mandates. Cloud is gradually finding its place in the general IT toolbox, pulled out when it is the best choice for the task at hand.

Cloud Forum in Action

Starting with the Cloud Maturity Model workshop, participants took a peer-designed framework and worked through breakout discussions to develop a detailed maturity model for cloud adoption in higher education. 

Institutions at very different points in their cloud journeys sat together in the same rooms. Some have spent a decade building mature cloud programs; others are still early in the transition from on-premises systems. 

Participants shared challenges such as creating secure research environments to meet evolving compliance standards and developing organizational FinOps practices to address the realities of moving to an OpEx world. They also swapped success stories, including real headway on DevOps practices for enterprise cloud management. The conversation turned practical from there: when cloud beats on-prem, and where AI tools are worth the reach. 

The value came from letting both groups compare experiences directly.

“Cloud Forum allows you to find your peers quickly … Within hours, you’ll know who shares your specific issues, who has solved them, or those who can commiserate with you,” said Cornelia Bailey, director of Information Assurance at the University of Chicago.

Other 2026 highlights included the unconference, lightning talks, and, for the first time, a closing vendor panel where the two cloud service providers in attendance, AWS and Microsoft, reflected on what they heard during the forum.

Shared Knowledge & Continuing Forward

In addition to these rich conversations, Tim Manik, cloud solutions architect at Internet2, launched the Answers by Experts (ABE) chatbot, an intelligent solution created by Internet2 and Cal Poly that makes hundreds of documents, video recordings, presentations, and audio files across the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program and Cloud Computing Community Group searchable via natural-language queries. 

ABE addresses a problem Manik sees often: generic web or AI advice might recommend budget controls or cheaper models while missing grant-funded cloud costs, research workflows, and institutional constraints. ABE instead operates on peer-generated knowledge, connecting practitioners to institutions that have already solved the problem in front of them. Its existence helps overcome traditional implementation obstacles.

Chris Manly, program manager of Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Services at Internet2, captured the inherent value of the Cloud Forum perfectly by saying, “Attendees stepped out of their institutional context and discovered where they are ahead, where they are struggling, and where their peers found a practical path through a problem they have not solved yet.” 

That is especially important in the current cloud environment. Universities are innovative academically and often fiscally conservative. Cloud teams sit in the middle, trying to preserve flexibility while managing institutional resources, security, compliance, and staffing constraints. 

Fortunately, the Higher Education Cloud Forum does not end when the last session closes. The pluses and deltas, survey results, workshop follow-up, and post-event conversations are already shaping what comes next.

It was a reminder that higher education cloud adoption is not a solo project. Institutions may face local budget models, local governance structures, local research demands, and local staffing realities. However, those patterns are shared, and the Higher Education Cloud Forum gives the community a place to see those patterns, name them, and work on them together.

Beyond the Cloud Forum

Cloud Forum only comes once a year. The community is active year-round.  

Keep the conversation going by engaging on our wiki and Slack channels or by subscribing your institution to the Cloud Infrastructure Community Program. Not sure which is right for you? Email me at bflynn@internet2.edu, and we can talk about what might work best for your interests.

The 2027 Higher Education Cloud Forum is scheduled for May 25-27 at the University of Virginia.