STRIDES Initiative

The NIH Science and Technology Research Infrastructure for Discovery, Experimentation, and Sustainability (STRIDES) Initiative is a partnership with commercial cloud service providers (CSPs) to allow NIH-supported researchers to affordably access cloud services and environments.  

The initiative aims to modernize biomedical research by reducing economic and process barriers to using commercial cloud services. These partnerships enable access to rich datasets and advanced computational infrastructure, tools, and services in ways that do not require large scale on-premises computational facilities.

The STRIDES Initiative established partnerships with Google Cloud in July 2018, Amazon Web Services (AWS) in September 2018, and Microsoft Azure in July 2021. Each CSP has established a billing partner to support NIH’s and NIH-funded investigators’ use of the respective cloud web services at a discounted rate.  NIH-supported researchers with an active NIH award may take advantage of the STRIDES Initiative for their projects. Eligible researchers include NIH intramural researchers and awardees of NIH contracts, other transaction agreements, grants, cooperative agreements, and other agreements. The detailed instructions on how to enroll STRIDES can be found in STRIDES website.