Old roadmap of the city of ManitobaCloud computing is big news for IT. But if you’re a Canadian, you’re at least a couple of years behind the U.S. when it comes to cloud options. Canada lacks the footprint, and is constrained by different laws. There’s a lot of uncertainty around Canadian cloud adoption, particularly when most Canadian startups look South of the border.

While Bitcurrent works primarily with U.S. and European clients, we’ve been getting more and more requests from folks in our native Canada for guidance on cloud adoption. As a result, we’re teaming up with Cloudventures (a virtual incubator for cloud startups) and cloud provider Joyent (which recently acquired Layerboom, giving them a Canadian footprint) to present a series of webinars focusing on the state of Canadian cloud computing.

The series will target the issues that are at the root of Canada’s slow adoption of clouds: security, Canadian privacy law, proximity to existing markets, economies of scale and skill, and so on. We’re hoping it will be a good discussion with a variety of viewpoints.

The first webinar in the series happens on Tuesday, October 12, at 1 pm EST/10AM PDT. You can sign up here.

We’ll bring in other experts in the coming months, and take a decidedly Canadian look at utility computing. If you can’t attend but want to be included in information distribution from the panel, just register and click “Send Info” to receive recordings, follow up documentation and future invites.