J.P. Morgan and Microsoft announce strategic partnership to drive enterprise adoption of Quorum

J.P. Morgan and Microsoft Corp. on Thursday announced they have signed a memorandum of understanding to form a strategic partnership to accelerate the adoption of enterprise blockchain. Through this partnership, Quorum, developed by J.P. Morgan, will become the first distributed ledger platform available through Azure Blockchain Service, enabling J.P. Morgan and Microsoft customers to build and scale blockchain networks in the cloud.

“We are incredibly proud of the success Quorum has had over the last four years, as organizations around the world use Quorum to solve complex business and societal problems via blockchain solutions,” said Umar Farooq, global head of Blockchain, J.P. Morgan. “We are delighted to partner alongside Microsoft as we continue to strengthen Quorum and expand capabilities and services on the platform. Azure will bring unique strengths to enterprise clients using Quorum.”

The partnership with Azure will further strengthen Quorum as a fully integrated, Ethereum-based blockchain platform and suite of applications. Together, the platform will enable enterprise businesses across all industries to shift their focus from infrastructure management to application development, ultimately driving transformative business value. Customers will be able to rapidly grow their networks while benefitting from lower costs, simplified deployment and built-in governance enabled through Azure Blockchain Service.

Going forward, J.P. Morgan and Microsoft will continue to work together to address common enterprise, independent software vendor, and developer needs for building and deploying blockchain applications on Quorum in the cloud. Microsoft will also provide engineering, consulting and go-to-market support for Quorum.

“As digital transformation extends beyond the walls of an individual organization, companies need solutions that enable them to securely share their business processes and data in order to drive imaginative new business models and reinvent industries. We’re thrilled to partner with a leader like J.P. Morgan to establish a foundation on which enterprises and partners can rapidly build and scale blockchain networks,” said Peggy Johnson, executive vice president of Business Development, Microsoft. “Together, we’re taking a truly transformative technology like Quorum and making it available through the Azure platform to accelerate innovation for our customers.”

In addition to providing a platform for Quorum customers to build blockchain networks and applications, Quorum will continue to power J.P. Morgan and Microsoft blockchain programs and first-party apps, such as the Interbank Information Network, JPM Coin and Microsoft’s Xbox royalty payment process, among others.

About J.P. Morgan’s Corporate & Investment Bank

J.P. Morgan’s Corporate & Investment Bank is a global leader across banking, markets and investor services. The world’s most important corporations, governments and institutions entrust us with their business in more than 100 countries. With $24 trillion of assets under custody and $444 billion in deposits, the Corporate & Investment Bank provides strategic advice, raises capital, manages risk and extends liquidity in markets around the world.

About Quorum

Quorum, led by Oliver Harris, offers an enterprise ready version of Ethereum for businesses that need a secure, reliable, and open-sourced blockchain solution. Quorum is designed to make adopting blockchain a seamless process.

Microsoft unveils new Azure Sentinel cloud security service

Ahead of next week’s big RSA security conference, Microsoft plans to introduce a new cloud service Thursday that will help customers manage their security efforts and also give them a way to tap into its world-class security talent.

Azure Sentinel is a cloud-based SIEM, or security information and event management (security folks like acronyms too) service that allows customers to view and respond to security alerts and threats across their corporate networks. Microsoft appears to be targeting this service at companies that are running SIEM software on their own servers and looking to modernize their approach, but it will also cover applications running across multiple public clouds and hybrid cloud, company executives said.

Security is hard. Threats grow every day as more and more applications flood the web, and software designed to flag potential malware or suspicious activity can overwhelm users with alerts that need to be investigated and dealt with. There is also a dearth of qualified cybersecurity professionals in the world at the moment, which has led to demand for artificial-intelligence based security services that reduce manual labor and a concentration of security talent at big companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.

With Azure Sentinel, “customers are able to automate 80 percent of the most common tasks defenders spend their time on today,” said Ann Johnson, corporate vice president for cybersecurity solutions at Microsoft, in a briefing ahead of the announcement.

Companies are also embracing more complex infrastructure strategies, with applications running on public clouds like Azure and on their own self-managed servers. Older products designed for the data center era can’t necessarily handle that complexity, said Microsoft’s Steve Dispensa, partner director for product management, security.

All the major cloud vendors pay very close attention to their own security efforts while also introducing products for customers to help them manage the parts of cloud security for which the customer is responsible. Amazon Web Services introduced its GuardDuty service at re:Invent 2017 and Google unveiled its Cloud Security Command Center last year.

One primary argument for cloud computing is that these companies are much better at security than your company probably is, and Microsoft will also introduce a new feature Thursday that lets users submit detailed questions to Microsoft security staff. It’s called Microsoft Threat Experts, and allow Windows Defender ATP customers to hit an “ask the expert” button on their dashboards to send a question to Microsoft alongside application or network data.

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