Public Cloud Made Easy for Swiss Higher Education


Following the strong positive feedback and high engagement at the 2025 edition, we are pleased to announce the second iteration of the Cloud Forward - Forum Day.
The 2025 event showed us the value of bringing together experts and decision-makers from our community to exchange on cloud-related topics. Whether you're in IT, procurement, research, or strategy—this is where your cloud journey gets easier.
While OCRE and GÉANT-related topics will remain a large part of the discussion, the 2026 edition will broaden the perspective to address cloud more generally. The programme will again feature keynote inputs, institutional case studies, provider perspectives and dedicated networking opportunities.

Who are we co-creating our event day with?

Agenda

-

Check-In & Welcome Coffee

-

Welcome

Claudia Lienert
-

Keynote NVIDIA​: The Industrial Revolution of Intelligence and Sovereignty​

Marc Stampfli
-

Elevator Pitches

-

Use Case Exoscale / VSHN: Moving away from vendor lock-in towards a sovereign and secured cloud platform

Dealing with medical data is one of the biggest security and data privacy challenges. There aren't that many regulations for such dataset in Switzerland, which leaves it to the IT companies to define their own principles and guidlines. We set our goal to be build up a sovereign, secured, modern and scalable cloud plattform with Swiss partners, which fills the regulatory gap and guarantees security and data privacy of our community members. As one of the biggeset providers in health sector, HIN has invested into this platform to enable our community members to benefit from securely hosted services and further on provide the possibility to host their own applications on our platform.

Mohammad Alavi
-

Use Case Bechtle / Azure: AI-powered Data Access in Geriatric Medicine

Geriatric medicine is evolving — and so is the technology behind it. The Universitäre Altersmedizin FELIX PLATTER (UAFP) in Basel, together with Bechtle, leverages Azure OpenAI Services and Microsoft Fabric to unlock the full potential of clinical data. Research queries are automatically translated into precise SQL statements, giving researchers fast, secure access to a rich data pool — accelerating discoveries and enabling truly personalised care for older patients.

Valentin Acevedo
-

Lunch & Marketplace Booths

Take the time to visit the marketplace booths, share experiences, and engage in conversations with cloud experts, partners, and colleagues.

-

Use Case AWS / Sparkle / Netcloud: Accelerate enterprise-level cloud adoption in research

AWS shows how a centralized framework with pre-built compliance tools, seamless onboarding, and HPC cloud bursting creates a fast lane to cloud adoption through AWS’s Research Acceleration Plan supporting the full research lifecycle from grant discovery to commercialization.

Agata Jablonka
-

Use Case SoftwareOne: Google Workspace as a complementary solution to Microsoft 365

How can Google Workspace meaningfully complement Microsoft 365 in a higher education environment? This presentation explores the trend of dual operations using a practical example from the UK and highlights the opportunities created by modern provisioning methods, Student Use Benefits, and complementary services such as DeepL.

Joe Morley, Mikolaj Von Bastian-Brzezinski
-

Use Case Switch Cloud: Cloud Transformation beyond Lift-and-Shift: Running the Evento Process Hub in the Switch Cloud

Evento is the campus management system used by many universities of applied sciences in Switzerland to manage the full student lifecycle – from enrollment to graduation.

This is an experience report from a complex pilot project in which FHNW and Swiss Learning Hub set out to deploy the recently developed workflow-based functionalities of Evento to the Switch Cloud. We will share what was necessary to achieve this, how we built and configured the infrastructure needed and how we deployed the necessary components. The presentation also includes some stumbling blocks that we have encountered and early-adopter lessons learned along the way, but also highlights where Switch Cloud exceeded our expectations.

Jan Geschke, Michael Hausherr, Tobias Scheurer
-

Wrap-Up

Claudia Lienert, Kaspar Scheller, Roman Bachmann
-

Farewell Apéro & Networking

Take the time to network, share experiences, and engage in conversations with cloud experts, partners, and colleagues.

Registration ist closed

Speakers

Agata Jablonka

Research & AI Sales Lead EMEA, AWS

Claudia Lienert

Head of Community Management, Switch

Jan Geschke

Product Owner Cloud Infrastructure Services, FHNW

Joe Morley

Global Technology Lead – Nonprofit, Research and Education, SoftwareOne

Kaspar Scheller

Senior Procurement Specialist, Switch

Marc Stampfli

Business Director Switzerland, NVIDIA

Michael Hausherr

Enterprise Architect, FHNW

Mikolaj Von Bastian-Brzezinski

Software Architect IT & Solutions, SoftwareOne

Mohammad Alavi

CTO, Health Info Net

Roman Bachmann

Domain Architect VS Cloud, Switch

Tobias Scheurer

Software Engineer, Swiss Learning Hub AG

Valentin Acevedo

Consultant Data & AI, Bechtle

Event language

This event will take place in English.

Event Location

Eventforum Bern

Fabrikstrasse 12

3012 Bern

The Eventforum Bern is easily accessible by public transport (PostBus, stop “Güterbahnhof”).

Getting there