R3 Blockchain Consortium and Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced a strategic partnership that will accelerate the use of distributed ledger technologies, among R3 member banks and global financial markets.

“I’m thrilled to announce a strategic partnership with R3, a consortium of leading banking institutions, to help move blockchain technology from hype to reality for the financial services industry”, said Peggy Johnson, executive vice president of global business development at Microsoft.

Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft will provide cloud-based tools, services and infrastructure for R3 lab locations across the globe, along with dedicated technical architects, project managers, lab assistants and support services. R3 has named Microsoft Azure as the preferred cloud services provider for its R3 Lab and Research Center serving over 40 member banks.

“With intelligent, cloud-based technology, R3 and member banks will experiment and learn faster, accelerating distributed ledger technology deployment,” said Johnson. “What’s more, our collaboration brings to light tremendous opportunities to rethink business processes and transform entire industries.”

R3 and Consortium members will also benefit from Microsoft’s enterprise-grade cloud security and privacy protections and will have access to Microsoft’s expanding ecosystem of Blockchain As A Service (BaaS) partners including Ethereum and ConsenSys, Ripple, Eris Industries, Coinprism, Factom, BitPay, Manifold Technology, AlphaPoint, IOTA, BlockApps STRATO, Tendermint LibraTax, and many others that will aid in the development, testing and deployment of distributed ledger applications in cloud, hybrid and local environments.

“The partnership between Microsoft and R3 will scale the use of distributed ledger technology in a way that will change the entire financial services industry,” said David Rutter, CEO of R3. “The Azure platform and intelligent cloud services bring advanced capabilities to this budding financial ecosystem, and the commitment by Microsoft will accelerate the adoption of distributed ledger technology around the globe and take our R3 Lab and Research Center offering to a new level of capability.”

The alliance will form the foundation of a strong and flexible ecosystem for member banks to develop and ultimately deploy real-world blockchain solutions.

The announcement comes following the distributed ledger experiment completed in January, in which R3 and 11 member banks of the consortium were connected on an R3-managed private P2P distributed ledger, based on Ethereum technology and hosted on a virtual private network in Microsoft Azure BaaS in an accelerated development environment.

Also, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud and Amazon AWS provided cloud computing resources to host the distributed ledgers in the trial of five distinct blockchain technologies, conducted by R3, in parallel in the first test of its kind.