Don't miss out on joining nearly 1,500 of your colleagues and peers at higher education's premier planning event of 2010, SCUP–45. The Society for College and University Planning's 45th annual, international conference and idea marketplace is July 10–14 in Minneapolis!

Click on the title, Shaping the Higher Education Cloud, to access the resource described, below.

As well, this recent issue of EDUCAUSE Review is focused on higher education's computing cloud, including these two feature articles:

• Cloud Computing and the Power to Choose
• Looking at Clouds From All Sides Now

Read all of this and you will be a cloud computing expert!

Is collaborative planning regarding the shape of the higher education information technology "cloud," possible? What should we plan to put on the cloud? What should stay out of the cloud? This white paper, the product of a joint project of EDUCAUSE and NACUBO, should be required reading for anyone who might be part of campus teams considering IT planning issues:

The unsustainable economics of higher education’s traditional approaches to IT, increased expectations and scrutiny, and the growing complexity of institutional operations and governance call for a different modus operandi. So too does the mass consumerization of services, for which students and faculty are more likely to look outside the institution to address their IT needs and preferences, noted James Hilton, vice president and CIO, University of Virginia. Cloud computing represents a real opportunity to rethink and re-craft services for the academy. Among the greatest benefits of scalable and elastic IT is the option to pay only for what is used. Robust networks coupled with virtualization technologies make less relevant where work happens or where data is stored. Cloud computing allows the flexibility for some enterprise activities to move above campus to providers that are faster, cheaper, or safer and for some activities to move off the institution’s responsibility list to the “consumer” cloud (below campus), while still other activities can remain in-house, including those that differentiate and provide competitive advantage to an institution.