Microsoft in the News
Coco Azure
Microsoft’s Coco Framework is not itself a blockchain protocol. Coco is the trusted foundation upon which blockchain protocols such as Ethereum, Hyperledger, Sawtooth, and Corda are integrated. Thus, Coco delivers an enterprise ready blockchain solution.
The Coco Framework in Microsoft’s Azure cloud allows organizations to quickly ramp up their blockchain initiatives. Although Ethereum is the big player in this framework, Microsoft has built in flexibility to Coco and allows you to use other blockchain technologies. It is compatible with any ledger protocol and can be used in the cloud, or on premises, and with any OS that supports a compatible Trusted Execution Environment (“TEEs”, e.g. Intel SGX and Windows VSM).
Microsoft’s has built a development environment that will allow organizations to develop their blockchain protocols and hopefully use it in novel ways not yet contemplated. By tackling the problems of confidentiality and scalability, blockchain’s advantages can be readily accessed by both small and large organizations around the world.
Blockchain was designed to be transparent. That does not suit the business needs of most enterprises. The last thing GM wants is for their business ledgers to be read by their competitors. Coco closes that door and allows an organization to keep their distributed ledger, confidential. With the Coco Framework, all nodes and actors are specifically declared, eliminating the public scrutiny required for the trusted operation of a cryptocurrency.
According to Microsoft, the Coco Framework delivers:
- Throughput and latency approaching database speeds.
- Business specific confidentiality models.
- Network policy management through distributed governance.
- Support for non-deterministic transactions.
- Computational efficiency (i.e., the energy cost for mining. See my first blog on blockchain)
Microsoft’s whitepaper on the Coco Framework was released on August 10, 2017, and can be found here:
https://github.com/Azure/coco-framework/blob/master/docs/Coco%20Framework%20whitepaper.pdf
