Thomas Shaw , Senior Project Manager , NIH STRIDES Initiative , discusses the transformative ability of cloud and how the project fosters collaboration

I t was in July 2018 that the first National Institutes of Health ( NIH ) Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery , Experimentation and Sustainability ( STRIDES ) Initiative was established . Partnering with Google Cloud and then , two months later , with Amazon Web Services ( AWS ), STRIDES was conceived as a method for the NIH to fully engage with cloud computing and explore its potential for collaborative data sharing . Part of the NIH ’ s wider strategy for digital transformation ( the Strategic Plan for Data Science ), STRIDES has and will continue to play an integral role in making the organisation ’ s biomedical data easier to access , use and integrate , as well as deliver a more costeffective form of data management .