Nichols Martin
Microsoft and the National Institutes of Health have partnered to help researchers analyze and manage large amounts of biomedical data by giving them access to the company’s cloud computing applications and services.
NIH has approved the Azure platform to support biomedical research workloads in the cloud as part of the agency’s Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability Initiative, according to a Microsoft blog post published Tuesday.
“We often risk losing the value of biomedical data because of the sheer volumes being generated and digitized around the world,” said Toni Townes-Whitley, president of U.S. regulated industries at Microsoft.
Townes-Whitley added that cloud and artificial intelligence platforms work to accelerate the identification and extraction of critical insights from a sea of information.
More than 425 research efforts have applied cloud resources via the STRIDES program to date and NIH has recorded over 83 million hours of computational resource usage by biomedical researchers for data analysis work in the cloud.
“We believe the cloud can help democratize access to the most advanced analytical technologies and enable researchers to perform complex analyses without the need for local infrastructure,” said Andrea Norris, chief information officer of NIH and director of the agency’s Center for Information Technology.
