Announcing the Public Preview of Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework

Customers and partners have expressed the following requirements:

• customizable governance across multiple parties that works even when some members depart
• transparency and auditability to see what data is being read and acted on, confidentiality to have end-to-end technical protection when dealing with sensitive data
• resiliency in scalable, performant infrastructure for enterprise capabilities
• developer friendly experience that has ease-of-use and does not require specialized development teams

To provide a solution that addresses these needs, we are announcing the public preview of Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework – a collaboration platform for decentralized trust and governance application development.  While the Confidential Consortium Framework continues to be available as open-source tool, this PaaS offering utilizes Confidential Computing’s hardware rooted application enclaves to provide a minimalistic trust boundary for computation of transactions and separating the governance from members for availability. Both transactions and governance will be auditable via a centrally hosted ledger.

Our customers are building asset management platforms to healthcare collaboration platforms. We want to hear about how you will use the service to build your own decentralized trust stateful services!

Example Scenarios

View some scenarios we are seeing, and we have made code samples available for these:

REFERENCE DATA RECONCILIATION APPLICATION

ROLE BASED ACCESS CONTROL APPLICATION

Testimonials

Calastone is leading innovation in the asset management industry by collaborating with regulators and asset managers on the next generation of collective investment products, which are natively digital, and can provide a more effective investment solution to Mutual Funds and ETFs. The Calastone Digital Investment platform, built on Microsoft Azure Managed CCF, creates an ecosystem that allows asset managers and other participants to collaborate in the manufacturing and servicing of these new products. These digitally native ‘tokenised’ investment vehicles enable asset managers to manufacture and distribute highly customisable and low-cost investment products to the benefit of retail and institutional investors. Calastone is now supporting Schroders, one of the largest global asset managers, in their work with the Singaporean regulator (MAS) to create a regulatory pathway to making this transformation a reality.
– Adam Belding, Chief Technology Officer

In the dynamic capital markets industry, firms face many challenges including fee pressure, changing investor preferences, regulatory changes, and market volatility. To effectively compete, their products and services need to depend on secure, highly available, and performant multi-party compute and data. Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework provides a powerful hosted application tool for customers and partners to reconcile data and create and exchange digital assets in a secure, transparent, and efficient way – with the confidentiality, governance, performance, and auditability they need all built-in.

– Bill Borden, CVP, Worldwide Financial Services

Our customers are telling us that confidential data sharing will be transformative to their industries, however enabling this on today’s technologies comes with difficult trade-offs on confidentiality and privacy, performance, and ease of adoption.  This is particularly true in regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare, and Government.  With Managed Confidential Consortium Framework, we are enabling our ISV partners to build products that deliver on each of these enterprise requirements.  The Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework enables customers to host their own stateful services with programmable control on data belonging to multiple members and in scenarios that require strong confidentiality. The service allows setting up governance rules for handling data in a manner ideal for collaboration with transparency and auditability built-in by default. 

– Mark Russinovich, Azure Chief Technical Officer & Technical Fellow

Getting Started  

• You can start deployments today in West Europe and South Central US. Southeast Asia will be available in early 2024.
• You can review code samples to determine what type of application to build.

Resources

• Azure Managed Confidential Consortium Framework documentation
• Learn more about the open-source framework on the new CCF website and read their whitepaper.
• Read about the evolution of Confidential Consortium Framework and its products via this blog