Case Study: Australian National University achieves faster, scalable genomics research with Microsoft Corporation Azure

Australian National University pioneers the next generation of genomics research by moving to the cloud

Australian National University, a top-ranked higher education institution in Australia, needed a faster and more flexible way to handle growing genome-scale research data. Its genomics team, led by Dr. Sebastian Kurscheid, was spending too much time on infrastructure and data processing, and wanted a secure way to manage and share large research datasets. They turned to Microsoft Corporation and Azure to support their research workflows.

Microsoft Corporation, working with BizData, migrated the department’s genomics pipeline to Azure using services such as Azure Batch, Azure Storage, Azure Virtual Machines, and Azure Container Service. The result was on-demand computing that delivered four times the computational power at half the cost of the prior on-premises setup, while reducing data analysis time by 50% to 75% and enabling results to be shared more quickly and securely with collaborators worldwide.

Australian National University

Sebastian Kurscheid

Research fellow in the Department of Genome Sciences