Research institutions across Europe face a critical shift in how data is collected, managed, analysed, and shared. Funders including NWO and the European Commission expect open, FAIR-compliant data practices. The Netherlands Reproducibility Network reflects a growing recognition that reproducibility and data governance are foundational to credible science.
Yet the practical infrastructure remains fragmented for most research groups: data scattered across local drives, pipelines that exist only in someone's head, collaboration via emailed spreadsheets, and analysis that cannot be re-run six months later when a journal reviewer asks.
These two workshops address the infrastructure layer of that problem — not by claiming technology alone solves the challenge, but by showing how cloud platforms can make good research data practices significantly easier to implement and sustain.
Attendees leave with a concrete understanding of how Microsoft Fabric and Azure support the full research data lifecycle: from ingestion and governance through to AI-assisted analysis and reproducible pipelines, illustrated through live demonstrations using real research datasets.
Microsoft and LLPA have come together to provide a series of training webinars focusing on the use of cloud services for research.
This first session establishes the research context before introducing technology. It opens with an honest examination of where current research data management practices fall short — drawing on the reproducibility challenges that Dutch and European research institutions are actively grappling with — then explores how cloud infrastructure can serve as a practical foundation for more rigorous and collaborative research workflows.
Microsoft Fabric is introduced not as an enterprise IT product but as a unified data platform that maps naturally onto research team structures and the research data lifecycle. The session culminates in a demonstration of AI-assisted data analysis using natural language queries over a research dataset.
