Alphabet’s Verily and Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have partnered with Microsoft to advance biomedical research.

Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft may be major rivals in the cloud market, but Alphabet’s Verily — its life and sciences company — is working with Microsoft to help remove the technical barriers for biomedical researchers.

But making use of these important datasets remains difficult for researchers who face huge, siloed data estates, disparate tools, fragmented systems and data standards, and varying governance and security policies.

The new partnership aims to break through those barriers by bringing together Microsoft’s cloud, data and AI technologies, and global network of more than 168,000 health and life sciences partners to accelerate development of global biomedical research through the Terra platform, provide greater access and empower the open-source community. Building on the open-source foundation of Terra, the new collaboration will advance the ability of data scientists, biomedical researchers and clinicians around the world to collaborate in tackling some of the most complex and widespread diseases facing society today.

Emphasizing the importance of a multi-cloud approach, a Verily spokesperson told VentureBeat that “Verily feels strongly that the open data ecosystem should be multi-cloud.”

Biomedical research is more important than ever, especially as the world grapples with a global pandemic. Verily, the Broad Institute and Microsoft’s efforts should go a long way toward easing the technical challenges biomedical researchers face.