Azure Confidential Ledger, Are You My Blockchain?

• Azure Confidential Ledger is a consortium blockchain service for customers preferring a fully hosted solution.
• The service simplifies deployment and scaling and includes an extendable data structure to meet unique data sharing needs.
• All parts of the blockchain (including ledger copies) are hosted on Azure, which may limit its ability to meet decentralization requirements.

Azure Confidential Ledger (in preview) is a PaaS offering that provides secure blockchain ledgers for controlling the logging, validating, and sharing of sensitive transactions. It can benefit organizations without extensive blockchain expertise, and it can be used to replace secure database applications that perform similar transactional logging. (For alternatives, see the sidebar “Confidential Ledger vs. Other Microsoft Options.”)

Defining Blockchain in 161 Words

A blockchain is a distributed ledger, composed of a time-stamped data structure that contains an entire history of transactions for a system and cannot be altered by any one party in the blockchain system. Blockchains use cryptographic tokens and algorithms and a peer-to-peer network that verifies transaction history, so transactions can be trusted without requiring a centralized authority or clearinghouse approving or vouching for the transactions. Copies of the blockchain are replicated across nodes (participants in the peer-to-peer network), and consistency of the copies is assured through a set of consensus algorithms.