In the course of the symposium "Operating the Cloud" at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam, cloud operation from the viewpoints of science and industry was discussed at 28th of October 2014. In addition to practice reports of  EMC², HP, Fujitsu und SAP, the VLBA Lab was represented with two contributions. Sascha Bosse presented his contribution "Evaluating IT Service Design Alternatives", in the context of which he had developed a model for the prediction of the availability, the performance and the costs of IT Service design alternatives. Hendrik Müller presented his contribution "Self-Configuring Data Imports for SAP HANA Cloud Environments", dealing with a concept for an adaptive platform that improves the speed of data imports.