By Michael Brown 1

As an MSP, you may know more than 99 percent of the population when it comes to cloud technology – but that doesn’t mean you know it all. So if you’re looking to expand your knowledge of cloud this year, here are a few conferences worth attending. Take a look:

Pulse 2014 (February 23-26, Las Vegas, Nevada): IBM Pulse 2014 is the ideal venue to explore the latest developments in cloud, security, asset management, and smarter infrastructure. The conference features visionary keynotes, leading edge education, and a solution expo featuring hundreds of products and services that can help you leverage cloud as a growth engine for your business.

CLOUD 2014 (June 24-29, Anchorage, Alaska): The goal of Cloud Computing is to share resources among the cloud service consumers, cloud partners, and cloud vendors in the cloud value chain. Hosted by the IEEE Computer Society, this week long conference in sunny Alaska attracts some of the world’s leading experts and academics on cloud security, big data, mobile and other areas.

The Fifth International Conference on Cloud Computing, GRIDs, and Virtualization (May 25-29, Venice, Italy): Learn about the latest trends and challenges in the cloud with tracks that include cloud computing cloud computing challenges; platforms, infrastructure and applications; grid networks, services, applications, virtualization and more.

Cloud Computing East 2014 (May 13-14, Washington D.C.): “This year’s CCE:2014 will focus on these three major sectors (government, finance, healthcare) whose use of cloud-based technologies is revolutionizing business processes, increasing efficiency ,and streamlining costs. Our speaking faculty will be made up of over 100 thought-leaders who will bring broad industry knowledge, technological savvy, and strategic insight.”

Cloud Connect Summit (March 31 – April 1, 2014, Las Vegas, Nevada): “This two-day pre-conference program offers a unique program format developed around ‘10 critical cloud decisions.’ Cloud Connect Summit zeros in on the most pressing cloud technology, policy and organizational decisions & debates for the cloud-enabled enterprise. Topics include in-depth analysis and comparison of the leading cloud stacks; the role of IT & CIO leaders in the new service provider model; embracing IT-as-a-Service, Agile IT & DevOps strategy; Open Data / Open Clouds & APIs.”

Closer 2014 (April 3-5, Barcelona, Spain): “The 4th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science, CLOSER 2014, focuses on the emerging area of Cloud Computing, inspired by some latest advances that concern the infrastructure, operations, and available services through the global network. Further, the conference considers as essential the link to Services Science, acknowledging the service-orientation in most current IT-driven collaborations.”

Cloud Expo 2014 (June 10-12, New York City): “Recent IDC research shows that revenue for public and private cloud servers will increase at an annual growth rate of 16.6 percent, generating $11 billion in 2016. And a recent Gartner report predicts that the volume of enterprise data overall will increase by a phenomenal 650 percent over the next five years. These two unstoppable enterprise IT trends, Cloud Computing and Big Data, will converge in Silicon Valley at 14th Cloud Expo.”

Did we miss a major cloud event? Be sure to let us know your conference plans for 2014 in the comment section below.