Microsoft Linking Products to Blockchain

| Publish date: 09/03/2018
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Three years ago, Microsoft Corporation was the first in the world to link Blockchain and the cloud through its cloud services platform, Microsoft Azure. Since then, the company has been slowly and quietly connecting its other products and services to Blockchain technology.

Limitless Data Mining Opportunity

According to the general manager of Microsoft Azure, Matt Kerner, the software behemoth has been quietly linking Microsoft platforms such as the Office 365 Outlook, SAP, SharePoint Online, Dynamics 365 CRM Online, Salesforce and even Twitter to the new Blockchain technology.

According to Kerner, the company did this so that users will be able to move their data from these platforms to the Azure cloud and subsequently to the Blockchain. Besides the often touted advantages of lowered costs and greater efficiency, there is another reason why Microsoft is linking pretty much all its products to Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).

One of the less-known benefits of using DLT in a cloud environment such as Microsoft’s Azure is that data can be amassed from many entities – at scale and in a standardized format. What this does is it allows for limitless possibilities in data mining and analysis – which is basically what Big Data is.

The Evolution of Big Data

To explore this dimension even more, the company created the Azure Blockchain Workbench. Launched in May, this service is focused on making the development of Blockchain based apps easier. The Azure Workbench is currently using the Ethereum Proof-of-Authority as its consensus protocol.

According to Kerner, this is all a part of the evolution of Big Data. Prior to Blockchain technology, the cloud was the biggest innovation in technology. It allowed different departments from the same company to collaborate on a single platform, thereby breaking out of their individual data silos.

The next step, says Kerner, is the Blockchain, which enables a single data set to be shared amongst multiple organizations. This has already led to improvements in transactions between companies today. And now, that change will also be felt in data analytics.

Data – The Most Valuable Resource

According to many, data is fast becoming the most valuable resource in the world today. To this end, there are companies being created whose sole purpose is to format and structure data so that AI can then run algorithms on them.

However, with the enterprise level Blockchain, that data is already formatted and structured – just waiting to be analyzed. Thus, according to Kerner, Blockchain is inadvertently creating multi-party business processes which have a single view on the data which all parties can trust.

This, says Kerner, will lead to massive amounts of data that was previously in silos and unstructured to a point where it could leveraged to drive exponential change.

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