How Cloudforce and Microsoft helped clinical researchers harness AI to accelerate their work

September 22, 2025

Few fields have as much promise to benefit from AI-powered workloads as medical and life sciences. The potential rewards are massive: faster research, better patient outcomes, and more personalized care. At the same time, few fields face as much pressure to use AI responsibly. Sensitive data, strict compliance requirements, and high operational complexity mean that even the most innovative life sciences organizations and research institutions must move carefully.

Longtime Microsoft partner Cloudforce knows how to help institutions navigate that risk-reward challenge. Starting out 13 years ago as a systems integrator with specialties in Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365, Cloudforce works exclusively in the Microsoft ecosystem. Their expertise spans Microsoft solutions like Azure AI and Azure AI Foundry, empowering them to develop AI agents and deploy generative AI that’s fast, compliant, easy to use, and cost effective.

This expertise has made Cloudforce an especially valuable partner in settings where data privacy and precision are paramount, such as biomedical research. Their experience building secure AI agents offers great potential to accelerate new discoveries, and the accessibility of those agents makes them powerful in the hands of almost any user, with low or even no code required. Their Azure-native flagship AI solution, nebulaONE, has already been adopted by more than 40 new university Azure OpenAI customers.

Some of these contacts were established through Cloudforce’s prolific cosponsorship of Microsoft hackathons—including a recent partnership with a major academic clinical research organization.

Deploying AI when security and privacy are paramount

With more than 130 faculty and nearly 1,000 support staff, the research organization in question is large, prestigious, and influential. Over its long history, it has completed more than 2,500 trials and research projects, enrolled more than 2 million patients, and published more than 20,000 pieces in peer-reviewed journals. With its vast troves of clinical data, the organization is always looking for ways to accelerate discovery.

However, innovation and acceleration can’t come at the cost of compromising sensitive data. Between HIPAA guidelines and other regulations, it was imperative that any solution the organization used could maintain the highest standards of patient privacy and compliance.

When another team housed within the same medical school as the research organization hosted a datathon, Cloudforce was happy to cosponsor it and introduce nebulaONE. They helped participants build agents that could quickly analyze data and demonstrate the platform’s security features. When one of the datathon winners turned out to have a nonengineering background, the Cloudforce team knew they had a product that was intuitive, usable, and could seamlessly help accelerate research.

An intuitive, secure way to accelerate research

Because the research organization was already on Azure, nebulaONE was a natural fit, as implementing the solution didn’t require any significant data migration. Better still, the platform—as well as the organization’s sensitive patient and clinical data—is hosted and securely stored entirely within a private cloud instance on Azure, with carefully implemented access rights, rigid security controls, and the ability to integrate with other Microsoft solutions, such as Microsoft Fabric.

“Our solution deploys directly in the cloud of the client,” explained Jesse Kellner, Chief Operating Officer at Cloudforce. “They are using our software that is running in their cloud, which means when they are querying their data, it doesn't go outside of the umbrella of their own governance, security, and compliance.”

“[The research organization] has a lot of policies and controls in place that prohibit outbound network traffic or any type of insecure event,” added Edward Hakin, Cloud Solutions Engineer at Cloudforce. “Thankfully, Azure has this great tool where you can analyze and view every single policy applied at the resource group. We were able to go back and forth through the entire stack and essentially write exceptions where it needed to happen and modify our code on the end.”

The way nebulaONE is installed at the research organization also helps with another potential concern: the cost. Rather than pay a per-user license fee, they pay only for what they use in the cloud. With hundreds of potential users, this can lead to real savings.

But what may be the platform’s biggest value is its ease of use. With low-code (or even no-code) plain-language prompts, researchers and staff can build powerful AI agents. These agents can help them accelerate their research, locate and compile data, and derive new insights—and the agents can provide citations for all of it.

Teams at the research organization are exploring additional use cases for nebulaONE that include refining patient recruitment methods for clinical trials and writing grant proposals to secure funding with less manual overhead. Researchers can tackle these tasks independently with nebulaONE’s self-serve approach, freeing up time to focus on more high-level processes.

Helping researchers across the globe deploy productive AI agents

With nebulaONE successfully deployed––and with ongoing product support from their partners at Cloudforce––the sky is the limit for researchers at the organization. Thanks to nebulaONE’s ease of use, anyone with access can come up with a new use case and build an AI agent to execute it. The potential to accelerate new discoveries, including treatment options and better outcomes for patients, is significant.

As for Cloudforce, they are going on to deploy nebulaONE at more academic medical centers, hospital systems, and universities, including many of the world’s most prestigious. With every deployment, they hope to continue escalating the pace of innovation and cutting down on manual tedium for researchers investigating some of the most complex and challenging issues society faces. And the team at Cloudforce credits much of this rapid progress to the support, stability, and power of the Microsoft partner ecosystem.

“While [nebulaONE] is industry agnostic, it's really taken a foothold in the education space, specifically for its ease of use and the security and compliance aspects that we've woven into the fabric of nebulaONE,” said Cunningham. “It’s a story about not just the power of Microsoft's platform, but the power of the partner platform––because that's really what we've leveraged to grow as fast and as hard as we've grown today.”