May 20 – 22, 2025 | New York University in New York, NY

The Cloud Forum

From the organizers to the speakers, the Cloud Forum is put on by higher education, for higher education. We’ve received a tremendous response to our calls for speakers this year. It looks like it’ll be another great Forum.

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 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 a decade old. In 2022 we took the Forum on the road and in 2025 we will visit New York University. We are excited to be in the Big Apple. There is talk of a real NY culinary experience (read: bagels and pizza). More campuses have an opportunity to showcase their institutions by hosting it. By moving it around the country, we also make it easier for more and more institutions to attend.

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 working on the major cloud platforms. In 2019 we added a half-day unconference and in 2021 a workshop. In 2024 the community nominated the research presenters. What innovation will the organizing committee come up with for 2025?

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 limited to staff, faculty, and with approval, students from research and education institutions as well as a few invited guests. The 2025 Cloud Forum venue will limit attendance to 120 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 logo
New York University to Host CF 2025
We are excited to be moving to the East Coast for Cloud Forum 2025. New York University will be our gracious hosts from May 20 to 22, 2025 at the Kimmel Center for University Life.

Host Jennifer Sparrow and her team at NYU are already hard at work to bring that New York magic (and bagels) in order to make CF25 a special experience.

Photo of the Grand Hall in the Kimmel Center for University Life at New York University University
Cloud Forum Celebrates 10 Years
Large group of professionals taking a group photo on a building staircase.

The 2024 Cloud Forum celebrated its 10th anniversary in style with a reception at the Computer History Museum where we toasted Cloud Forum founder and Cloud Superhero, Sarah Christen of Cornell University.

The Cloud Forum has completed its pivot to spring, returning to a full 2.5-day format with the full suite of content formats, including lightning talks, research presentations, an unconference, workshop (FinOps in 2024), a Game Night, and more.

Stanford University, host Lucrecia Kim-Boswell, and the whole Stanford team did a spectacular job on all aspects of the event, even the amazing weather (I know, shocking, right?).
Will You Be a Cloud Forum Host?
Hosting the Cloud Forum is a great opportunity shine a light on the great work your institution does and to contribute to this amazing community. In keeping with the high standard set by Sarah Christen and the Cornell University team, every institution to host the Cloud Forum has shown brightly and impressed all who attended.

We are always looking for our next great host. Want to bring the Cloud Forum to your Institution? Read about hosting the Cloud Forum.

Cloud Forum Timeline

  • Call for Proposals for Research Presentations Opens: Monday, October 14, 2024
  • Call for Proposals for Cloud Presentations Opens: Monday, October 14, 2024
  • Calls for Proposals Close: Friday, December 20, 2024
  • Researcher and Speaker Notification: Thursday, January 23, 2025
  • Full Schedule Posted: Monday, February 24, 2025
  • Registration Opens: Monday, February 24, 2025
  • Cloud Forum Convenes: May 20 – 22, 2025