As rival Amazon enters the health-care space, Microsoft seeks new business from medical firms moving to cloud.

Microsoft is releasing new cloud technologies to fight disease and help health-care companies abide by privacy law.

The company unveiled a tool for its Azure service that puts computing resources to the task of gene-analysis for precision medicine. It's already in use at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, which will report its progress with extremely rare cancers at the American Association for Cancer Research conference in April, said Peter Lee, a Microsoft vice president for artificial intelligence and research.

Microsoft is also offering templates for health companies that want to use its Teams corporate chat program, while ensuring conversations follow the industry's privacy and data-retention rules.

The company has also used its machine-learning tools to create Project Empower MD, a tool that automatically transcribes patient and doctor conversations, along with key moments from appointments, and formats the information in a standard way.

The company is also releasing a blueprint for firms that want to move health data to the cloud while following privacy regulations.

Amazon.com Inc. has also announced plans to offer health services to its own employees.