Microsoft Azure Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) empowers adoption of blockchain in India
Blockchain is one of the top ten emerging technologies of 2016, as per the World Economic Forum, and has immense potential to fundamentally change the way markets and governments work. Recognizing this early on, Microsoft has launched Microsoft Azure Blockchain-as-a- Service (BaaS) that provides an open, hyper-scale cloud platform and an expanding ecosystem of blockchain technologies for enterprises, consortiums and governments. It enables them to learn and innovate quickly through pilots and prototypes in a cost-effective manner.
Today, more than 80 per cent of the world’s largest banks and more than 75 per cent of the global systemically important financial institutions are using Microsoft Azure, representing the highest bar for legal, compliance, security and acquisitions teams.
Ethereum Foundation’s Chief Scientist Vitalik Buterin notes, “We are seeing good leadership with Microsoft in bringing blockchain to their customers using the Azure platform. We highly appreciate their continued support and collaboration with the Ethereum Foundation and the Ethereum ecosystem. We look forward to continuing to work together in the future.”
Using Microsoft Azure BaaS, R3 has created a peer-to-peer distributed ledger, with multiple blockchain partners such as smart contract platforms – Ethereum, Eris and Tendermint, that connect many of the consortium’s leading banks, including Barclays, Credit Suisse, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
According to Peter Gartenberg, General Manager, Enterprise and Partner Group, Microsoft, “In India, the availability of Microsoft Azure BaaS from local, hyper-scale data centers, with their hybrid cloud capabilities, extensive compliance certification portfolio, and enterprise-grade security will help enable blockchain adoption in the regulated sectors like banking and financial services, insurance and healthcare as well as governments. It will help them optimize their Digital Transformation journey in a cost-effective yet scalable manner across development, testing and production environments.”
Microsoft and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have announced collaboration on blockchain to fuel transformation of trade finance transacting. KPMG Singapore has recently announced their Digital Ledger Services with Microsoft Azure’s BaaS to address the growing demand of the customers in the region for blockchain. The Azure marketplace has eight blockchain partner solutions enabled via single-click deployment. These include blockchain infrastructure, identity services and self-contained development environments.
Since launching BaaS in 2015, Microsoft has been working side by side with businesses and partners to understand core industry scenarios, and to develop the technologies and ecosystem through Project Bletchley. The project outlines the vision for an open, modular blockchain fabric powered by Azure. Microsoft has already launched an initial version of Project Bletchley, allowing users to create a diverse distributed ledger ecosystem to focus on the requirements of private multi-node consortium networks. Additionally, Microsoft has been integrating the Solidity language into development tools such as Visual Studio to enable rapid development of next- generation decentralized applications on blockchain.
The mission to drive a digital transformation in businesses of all sizes and across verticals, is an exciting one and hugely challenging. The Cloud, advances in Big Data and IoT, the progress in machine learning – makes this an exciting area to apply oneself and drive this transformation. Starting December 2016, I will be leading the Cloud and Server business at Microsoft. This includes the Microsoft Azure platform, Windows\SQL Server products and the Visual Studio developer tools businesses.
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