This potential bombshell story has gone largely unnoticed by the crypto community. Microsoft announced the launch of Ethereum Proof-of-Authority on Azure. However, the lack of fanfare around the announcement shouldn’t be mistaken as indicative of the many practical implications of the launch.

Writing on the Microsoft Azure blog, Cody Born, a software engineer with Azure Global, hit an optimistic note about the deployment, “We’ve had great traction with our support of Ethereum on Azure. The existing Proof-of-Work solution has been deployed tens of thousands of times across a variety of industry verticals. Through the extensive development on our platform, we’ve received great feedback from the community that has helped us shape our next Ethereum ledger product. I’m excited to announce the release of Ethereum Proof-of-Authority on Azure.”

Ethereum on Azure allows users to deploy and configure an Ethereum blockchain network in minutes. This has the chance of increasing the possibility of Ethereum consumer and enterprise adoption. (Related: What Is The Enterprise Ethereum Alliance?)

Many implications

Blockchain has several practical applications on an enterprise level which is why a partnership between Microsoft azure and Consensys Ethereum makes a lot of sense. Financial services firms in particular are more keen on implementing blockchain technology, case in point being JP Morgan’s quorum technology.

With Ethereum being used by Microsoft’s enterprise partners, a whole new gamut of applications can be enabled such as electronic voting, employee compensations, cloud storage, smart contract enabled agreements, supply chain oversight and more.

“This will greatly simplify several task for enterprises and allow them to focus on their core activities thereby enhancing their revenue and key skills. Additionally this partnership will compete with existing and upcoming enterprise blockchains such as vechain, quorum, hashgraph and R3 corda”, commented Kartik Mehrotra, Head Of Business Development at IOTW.

Having Microsoft’s credibility and resources will indeed allow a faster adoption of blockchain technology on enterprise level and also compel competitors such as Salesforce and Adobe to rethink their strategies.

Recently new projects are taking Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus models. The PoA doesn't require tremendous amount of CPU usage unlike the standard Proof of Work, and tends to be more secured than Proof of Stake model.

"Although some might consider PoA is not a decentralized model, everyone agrees that it makes it easier for the company to manage and secure its product," said Alex Bouaziz, SciDex CEO.

By offering the Ethereum POA on Azure, Microsoft will significantly help adoption and lead the trend for other large players to help the industry.