Microsoft on Thursday announced the Coco Framework, a new framework that enables businesses to adopt blockchain technology for increased enterprise privacy and security.

Coco Framework connects to different blockchain networks to solve some of the issues that have slowed down their adoption, including speed and privacy concerns.

Coco, whose names stands for Confidential Consortium, will be ready and made open source by 2018, Microsoft said.

Current blockchain protocol technology requires complicated development techniques to meet the operational and security needs of enterprises. Microsoft says that the Coco Framework reduces this complexity, and when integrated with blockchain networks addresses critical needs for commercial adoption like high-transaction speed, distributed governance and confidentiality.

"Blockchain is a transformational technology with the ability to significantly reduce the friction of doing business," said Mark Russinovich, chief technology officer of Azure at Microsoft. "Microsoft is committed to bringing blockchain to the enterprise. We have listened to the needs of our customers and the blockchain community and are bringing foundational functionality with the Coco Framework. Through an innovative combination of advanced algorithms and trusted execution environments (TEEs), like Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) or Windows Virtual Secure Mode (VSM), we believe this takes the next step toward making blockchain ready for business."

When integrated with a blockchain network, key benefits of the Coco Framework include these:

• Transaction speeds of more than 1,600 transactions per second
• Easily managed data confidentiality without sacrificing performance
• A comprehensive distributed governance model for blockchain networks that establishes a network constitution and allows members to vote on all terms and conditions governing the consortium and the blockchain software system

The Coco Framework by design will be compatible with any ledger protocol and can operate in the cloud and on premises, on any operating system and hypervisor that supports a compatible TEE. Initial Coco Framework implementations will include R3 Corda, Intel Hyperledger Sawtooth, J.P. Morgan Quorum, and Ethereum.

Microsoft will launch the framework on GitHub in 2018 as an open source project.