On February 10, 2024, CEM Global Solutions hosted the Cloud Solutions Summit in Las Vegas, bringing together cloud architects, CIOs, and delivery leaders from across the country. The summit built on the conversations from our 2023 Enterprise Cloud Conference and pushed forward into the questions that matter most in 2024: cloud at AI scale, platform engineering as a product, and the economics of running hybrid environments sustainably.
Opening Keynote: Cloud in the AI Era
The summit opened with a keynote on what cloud architecture looks like when generative AI becomes a first-class workload. GPU capacity, model lifecycle, vector databases, and the data pipelines feeding them all change the shape of the platform. The session grounded the hype in a set of concrete patterns that teams can adopt today.
Featured Tracks
- AI-Ready Cloud Architecture: Designing landing zones, networking, and storage for training and inference at enterprise scale.
- Platform Engineering as a Product: Building internal developer platforms with golden paths, paved roads, and measurable developer experience.
- FinOps 2.0: Moving from reporting to real-time cost governance tied to product ownership.
- Zero-Trust at Cloud Scale: Practical zero-trust patterns for hybrid, multi-cloud, and identity-centric enterprises.
- Data Products and Mesh Architectures: Treating data as a product with clear ownership, quality, and discoverability.
- Modernizing the Mainframe: Patterns and anti-patterns from real mainframe-to-cloud journeys.
- ServiceNow on Cloud: ITSM, ITOM, SecOps, and Strategic Portfolio Management as the unifying control plane.
- Observability for Complex Systems: OpenTelemetry, SLOs, and the rise of AIOps for noisy environments.
- Responsible AI Guardrails: How to embed fairness, privacy, and safety into production ML systems.
Customer Fireside Chats
Three fireside chats brought customer stories to the stage. A national retailer shared how it consolidated fifty-plus applications onto a unified cloud platform while reducing total cost of ownership by nineteen percent. A regional bank walked through its zero-trust journey, including the cultural work required to make it stick. A large provider network described how a ServiceNow-led operating model transformed incident response across a distributed IT organization.
Hands-On Labs
The afternoon featured four hands-on labs. Attendees built a reference landing zone in Azure, configured a ServiceNow ITOM discovery against a simulated estate, tuned a cost allocation tagging strategy across AWS, and stood up a simple retrieval-augmented generation pattern using a managed vector database. Feedback again ranked these the most valuable sessions of the day.
Themes That Emerged
Three themes echoed through the summit. First, AI workloads are now shaping platform decisions in ways that were unimaginable two years ago. Second, platform engineering has matured into a distinct product discipline with real metrics and real customers. Third, the cost conversation has moved out of finance and into engineering, with FinOps embedded directly in product teams.
What Is Next
We closed the day with a look at what comes next, including new accelerators for AI-ready landing zones, an updated reference architecture for multi-cloud observability, and expanded FinOps enablement programs for enterprise customers. We also announced the Cloud Innovation Conference, which will continue the conversation later in 2025.
Every conversation circled back to the same truth: the cloud is no longer the destination. It is the foundation for everything that comes next, including an AI-native future that is already arriving.
Thank you to the speakers, sponsors, partners, and attendees who made the Cloud Solutions Summit 2024 a milestone event for our team. We are excited to keep building with you.