Thriving economies are characterized by focus and investment into fair and safe trade. Trade, by definition, requires multiple stakeholders to come together and exchange goods and services for mutual benefit with the government playing a key role in ensuring the safe and fair attributes of the exchange. Technology has proven to be an enabler and accelerator for international trade through the digitalization of previously paper-based processes and enablement of almost real-time data exchange to prevent delays at the border and to enable seamless customs and ports operations. New technologies, such as AI, IoT and distributed ledger technology (DLT), are enabling automation, supporting remote monitoring and building command and control centers at the borders.
Microsoft’s vision on the evolution of trade in a digital world is represented by the intelligent connected trade windows, where with real time data collaboration achieved, new services are unlocked enabling better capacity utilization, new value creation, cost optimization, trusted transactions through confidential ledgers and API data integration that provide supply chain visibility and dynamic routing and pricing.
Microsoft is putting a special focus on innovation, integration and interoperability. Trusted data collaboration and portability of workloads between platforms is vital if customs and ports authorities are to realize the benefits of agile, elastic digital infrastructure.
Trust is a key ingredient in data collaboration. This is why we have invested in an Open Source Framework: Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF) that enables building highly available stateful services that leverage centralized compute for ease of use and performance, while providing decentralized trust. It enables multiple parties to execute auditable compute over confidential data without trusting each other or a privileged operator.
And while the data divide is not inevitable, the economic, societal and governance advantages that safer data collaboration brings will be unlocked through intelligent connected trade windows.