Microsoft Readies Service to Let Cloud Customers Pool Data Safely

As Microsoft weaves more artificial intelligence into its Azure cloud services and applications, it is also working on security and privacy software to assure customers their information doesn’t fall into the wrong hands when stored on cloud servers shared by multiple customers.

As part of this goal, Microsoft is developing an Azure cloud service—code-named Project Oakes—that will let multiple organizations pool data from their business operations in what is known as a data clean room, according to two current Microsoft employees. According to a recent Microsoft job listing, the Project Oakes service will let two or more entities search the data, apply machine-learning models to the pooled data and get results back, all without being able to see the other parties’ data.