More and more companies world-wide have embarked on an exciting cloud journey that may have started with humble steps into the world of Microsoft Teams. But while MS Teams may have been the catalyst for cloud readiness, there is a plethora of exciting and really useful services that come as part of the whole package, i.e. Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure.

But what does this have to do with gender equality? As part of my voluntary activities, I have been an advocate for female empowerment and have been providing free Cloud Enablement Courses to women that found themselves stuck in dead-end menial jobs or whose livelihood, before those courses, was threatened by digital advancements rather than enriched.

Providing these Cloud Enablement Courses has shown me that there is an exciting, untapped potential for women to explore that is closely tied not only to essential IT skills, but cloud skills in particular.

In this talk, I want to:
- highlight the potential for cloud-based female empowerment,
- dive into results and outcomes from previous efforts,
- outline past and ongoing challenges in the field of cloud administration and development for men and women and
- provide an action plan for taking this idea to the next level