Blockchain to be integrated in major products of Microsoft, eventually

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing service created by Microsoft for building, testing, deploying, and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. In the recent news, Blockchain has captured the attention of the business and technology world as a way to streamline business processes, verify transactions, and reduce the potential for fraud.

Blockchain as a Service (BaaS), in Microsoft Azure, used to build a secured data structure and create a distributed transactional digital ledger. The blockchain is a secure, shared, distributed ledger that can be public, private or consortium (that is, restricted to named members only). It’s secure because it uses cryptography to create transactions that are difficult (if not impossible with current computing technology) with which to tamper. A blockchain value is indeed directly linked to the number of entities that participate in them. Critically, blockchain data and contracts are distributed, which means that there are many replicas of the database. And finally, blockchain is a digital ledger, a transactional database that appends only immutable records of every transaction that occurs.

Azure Blockchain Workbench leverages different blockchain ledgers and existing cloud services to enable a robust blockchain ecosystem for the enterprise. It’s an easy-to-use tool with a simplified interface that enables users to create end-to-end blockchain applications that leverage the best of Azure services, including Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Azure Key Vault, Azure SQL Database, Application Insights, Azure Functions and Service Bus. And it does so around popular blockchains and into a reference architecture that can be used to build blockchain-based applications.

Blockchain on Azure provides a rapid, low-cost, low-risk platform for building and deploying blockchain applications. Azure, basically, offers Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) by providing several easy-to-deploy, enterprise-ready templates for the most popular ledgers, including Ethereum, Quorum, Hyperledger Fabric, Corda and more.

Let’s look at what the future looks like in the Microsoft vision for blockchain technology. Coming soon, the Microsoft Confidential Consortium (Coco) Framework is an open source system that enables high-scale, confidential blockchain networks that meet all key enterprise requirements for confidentiality, governance, and performance, and at the same time provide a means to accelerate production enterprise adoption of blockchain technology.

Azure Blockchain is a collection of Azure services and capabilities designed to help enterprises create and deploy a new class of applications for sharing business processes and data with multiple, semi-trusted organizations.