Microsoft partners with Alphabet-owned Verily to bring Terra platform to Azure

Terra platform is actively used by thousands of researchers every month to analyze data from millions of participants in important scientific research projects. Microsoft today announced a partnership with Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Verily, an Alphabet company to bring the Terra platform to Azure cloud. It is important to note that Terra platform was previously available only on Google Cloud.

In addition to Terra platform support on Azure, Microsoft is also joining Verily and Broad as an equal partner in the development and operation of the Terra platform.

Microsoft will dedicate software engineering resources to further developing Terra; lend their machine learning expertise to scientific advancements through Terra; and help drive adoption in the clinical sphere thanks to the global network of more than 168,000 healthcare organizations they already serve.

Through this new partnership, the companies will accelerate Terra’s vision for health and life sciences research by:

• Expanding on Terra’s open, modular and interoperable research platform, with the addition of the Microsoft Azure cloud, data and AI technologies, and global capabilities
• Increasing Terra’s accessibility to the more than 168,000 health and life sciences organizations partnering with Microsoft around the world
• Enabling secure and authenticated access to distributed data stores via collaborative workspaces
• Allowing access to a rapidly growing portfolio of open and proprietary standards-based tools, best practices workflows and APIs
• Enabling federated data analysis to uncover insights and build novel analytical and predictive models while ensuring patient privacy
• Creating a seamless and secure flow to speed the delivery of data and insights between research and clinical domains
• Using open APIs and modular components to advance the standards-based biomedical data ecosystem in line with the open, compatible and secure approach to data developed by the Data Biosphere and the responsible policies and technical standards established by the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health

“More generally, we’re very excited about Microsoft’s deep expertise in a number of complementary fields, ranging from scalable computing, to artificial intelligence, to connection with healthcare systems. This is a wellspring of opportunities for us to improve the Terra platform to better serve the needs of the thousands of researchers who already trust us with their work, and the uncountable more who will come to participate in the biomedical data ecosystem through Terra as a result of this partnership. If you are one of them, we look forward to witnessing the amazing breakthroughs you will achieve,” wrote Geraldine Van der Auwera from Terra team.

Source: Microsoft