Tech giant Microsoft last week launched Azure Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) in India. BaaS provides a fast, low-cost and low-risk platform for organisations to collaborate together by experimenting with new business processes – backed by a cloud platform, The Economic Times reported.

Microsoft describes blockchain as a data structure that is used to create a digital transaction ledger that, instead of resting with a single provider, is shared among a distributed network of computers. It sees several applications of blockchain – ranging from loans, bonds, and payments to more efficient supply chains to even identity management and verification.

"In India, the availability of Microsoft Azure BaaS from local, hyper-scale data centres will help enable blockchain adoption in regulated sectors like banking and financial services, insurance and healthcare as well as governments," Peter Gartenberg, General Manager, Enterprise and Partner Group, Microsoft, said in a statement.

As an open, flexible, and scalable platform, Azure supports a rapidly growing number of distributed ledger technologies that address specific business and technical requirements for security, performance, and operational processes. The Azure marketplace has eight blockchain partner solutions enabled via single-click deployment, which includes blockchain infrastructure, identity services and self-contained development environments.

According to the website, the current stack of blockchain partner solutions includes STRATO BlockApps, Emercoin Blockchain Engine, EthCore, Chain Core Developer Edition, Ether.Camp, and others.

Microsoft said that it has been integrating the Solidity language into development tools such as Visual Studio to enable rapid development of next generation decentralised applications on blockchain.

The launch follows the recent partnership between KPMG and Microsoft India aiming to accelerate the digital transformation in large and mid-market enterprises in the country. The companies will extend their services and will work on emerging technologies like blockchain.