The fourth day of MS Ignite 2017, I followed some more sessions on security related topics. The focus was on Blockchain and some more on GDPR regulation.
With regards to Blockchain it is clear that in current economies people are trying the remove the middleman. In the commercial world this means lawyer and banks. Banks can be replaced by crypto-currency and lawyers by intelligent contracts. So Blockchain is seen by these middlemen as disruptive breaking down expensive systems that had sometimes not a lot of added value. The response is either fear or greed driven. Fear by pointing to the risks and complexity of trusting systems to deal with objects of potential high financial value. Greed is where middleman reluctantly abandon their position as their monopoly is broken down.
When getting into Blockchain the industry is demanding solutions to organize proof of concepts in such a way they can fail fast and cheap if things would not work out. To support this MS offers SaaS solutions that can be kept private i.e MS Coco Framework. In general, Blockchain environments fall into two categories. Either some public Blockchain offering is used running under the bonnet. Either a private Blockchain is used and participating members treat this as a trusted third party.