Amazon Web Services Joins NIH’s STRIDES Initiative

By Bio-IT World Staff

October 24, 2018 | Amazon Web Services (AWS) has joined the National Institutes of Health’s Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative. Launched in July 2018, the STRIDES Initiative aims to harness the power of commercial cloud computing for NIH biomedical researchers. Initially, NIH’s efforts will focus on making high-value data sets more accessible to researchers and experimenting with new ways to optimize technology-intensive research. 

The agreement with AWS will help NIH researchers, as well as researchers at more than 2,500 academic institutions across the nation receiving NIH support, make use of AWS’s wide range of technologies.

“Teaming with Amazon Web Services will give NIH researchers powerful cloud-based resources to more efficiently collaborate and analyze data,” Andrea T. Norris, Director of NIH’s Center for Information Technology and NIH Chief Information Officer, said in a press release. “Expanding our cloud service provider network will allow us to provide the research community access to the tools they need to advance science. AWS’s longstanding leadership in the cloud space will help bolster the innovative research being conducted through NIH support.”

The STRIDES Initiative is part of the NIH Common Fund’s New Models of Data Stewardship Program (NMDS), designed to enhance biomedical discovery and improve efficiency through new digital data management strategies-strategies that contribute to NIH efforts to develop and sustain a modern biomedical data ecosystem. The program also aims to make data for research findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable in the cloud. The two NMDS program components, the STRIDES Initiative and the NIH Data Commons Pilot Phase, are testing ways to bring high-value biomedical data sets into the cloud and to establish and evaluate best practices for using the data. AWS is the second cloud service provider to join the STRIDES Initiative following Google Cloud.

The STRIDES Initiative and related efforts support NIH’s Data Science Strategic Plan, which articulates specific priorities that address developing reliable, accessible, and appropriately secured modes of data storage and use, transforming a fragmented set of individual components into a coordinated, efficient, and optimally useful ecosystem.