Microsoft's Case for Blockchain

SEATTLE—At a packed session of over 1,000 people at Microsoft Build here, Azure CTO (and tech thriller novelist) Mark Russinovich schooled attendees on the basics of blockchain, Bitcoin, and cryptocurrencies—and how Microsoft tools can help leverage these nascent technologies.

Russinovich showed how like shooting fish in a barrel it is to create your own cryptocurrency in Visual Studio with the Solidity plugin. But more important for the enterprise is the Coco (Confidential Consortium) Framework and the Azure Blockchain Workbench (currently in public preview) set of hosted services.

Potential non-cryptocurrency uses for blockchain that Coco supports include business transactions, real manor, diamond tracking, and hotel inventory. Millions of dollars of fraud in hotel inventory sales could be stamped out past tracking the transactions using blockchain, Russinovich pointed out.

Blockchain on Azure

Coco uses trusted execution environments (TEEs) such equally Intel's SGX in order to spare the organization from the computing resources intensive consensus and proof-of-work computation like that required by Bitcoin. Coco also enables consortium blockchain, with restricted participants, as opposed to the public blockchain of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin.

Coco is not a blockchain ledger protocol itself, but instead can utilize Ethereum, R3's Corda, Hyperledger Sawtooth, or JPMorgan'south Quorum. Microsoft plans to release the Coco Framework lawmaking as open source on GitHub this year.

The Coco Framework has been around for nearly a year, just at Build, Russinovich appear "the availability of the latest generation of Intel Xeon Processors with Intel SGX technology in our East United states of america Azure region" along with new virtual machine technology that uses them and the power to build C/C++ applications with the Intel SGX SDK and additional enclave APIs. Considering of course the system is hosted by the Azure cloud, though you tin can besides run it on premises.

The blockchain train keeps gathering speed; according to IDC, corporate spending on blockchain technologies will reach $9.7 billion by 2022, then enterprises ignore this transformative technology at their peril.

Near Michael Muchmore

Michael Muchmore

Michael Muchmore is PCMag'due south atomic number 82 analyst for software and web applications, with an emphasis on photograph editing, video editing, and Windows. A native New Yorker, he has at various times headed up coverage of spider web development, enterprise software (including databases and application servers), and display technologies (monitors and TVs). Michael cowrote one of the start overviews of web services for a full general audience. Before that he worked on PC Magazine's Solutions section, which educated readers well-nigh programming techniques like C+ and Visual Basic, as well as offer tips on using office productivity software. He previously covered services and software for ExtremeTech.com.