Tech giant Microsoft has struck a partnership with Consensys, a startup company that focuses on Ethereum technology. As expected by the tech community, Microsoft announced its plans for cloud-based blockchain services at the Ethereum Developers Conference on Tuesday, Nov. 10.

Microsoft's acquisition of Consensys will allow its Azure clients to easily create cloud-based computing services. This services could range from securities trading, corporate accounting to cross-border payment.

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According to Reuters, the platform will be available for insurance companies and banks that have already migrated to Microsoft's cloud-based Azure platform. Microsoft claims that four large international financial institutions have already signed up to its services.

Microsoft director of tech strategy for financial services Marley Gray told Bitcoin Magazine, "Working with our customers that wanted to start playing around with blockchain technology, the major pain point that we kept hearing from them was that it was just too hard to get started, and too expensive."

Microsoft announced that it is partnering with Consensys in order to create Ethereum Blockchain as a Service (EBaaS) on the Azure platform. This will allow Azure Enterprise clients as well as developers to have direct access to the cloud-based blockchain environment.

EBaaS will initially offer two tools, Ether.Camp and BlockApps. These two tools will allow developers to create smart contracts faster. Microsoft also added a quickstart template that can deploy a Go Ethereum client Azure along with a genesis block on Ubuntu virtual machines.

Microsoft's partnership with Consensys will help the former's growing portfolio of cloud-based services. The partnership will also help in the development of Ethereum now that the platform is slowly gaining prominence in the field of information technology.

TagsAzure, Ethereum, Ether, Ethereum Platform