R3 on Azure: Strengthening our partnership

Blockchain is increasingly prevalent as a topic of interest in our conversations with business leaders. A growing number of our customers and partners are experimenting with the technology as a secure and transparent way to digitally track ownership of assets, and are partnering with Microsoft to build a new class of distributed applications on Azure.

As financial institutions and fintechs move their blockchain projects from innovation labs to lines of business, they require a seamless integration between their preferred ledger stack and infrastructure, and a robust set of platform components and tooling to develop, manage, and optimize blockchain applications. To meet these growing needs, Microsoft is expanding its strategic partnership with R3 to more deeply integrate R3’s distributed ledger platform, Corda and R3Net, with Azure.

Our partnership with R3 goes back to 2016, when we announced plans to accelerate the adoption of distributed ledger technologies among R3 member banks and make Azure the preferred cloud services provider for the R3 Lab and Research Center. Since then, scores of customers across banking and capital markets have used our Corda templates as the foundation for distributed applications.

We are extending our partnership to more deeply integrate Corda’s capabilities with Azure services. This will enable developers to design and build apps on Corda, known as CorDapps, using enterprise tools they’re already familiar with such as Azure Active Directory for identity management, Key Vault for key management, and Azure SQL Database for off-chain storage and analytics. Azure will also provide critical enterprise capabilities for running blockchain infrastructure securely and at scale, including Azure Express Route for secure, high performance hybrid topologies and Azure Management and Security capabilities for turnkey operations management.

We are excited for the outcomes this partnership will enable for our customers. R3 has tailored its platform to meet the specific needs of financial institutions and have a deep bench of industry experts focused on building a product uniquely suited for banking scenarios. Partnering with R3, we aim to develop a rich portfolio of offerings that can help our customers accelerate the most ambitious blockchain projects.