Trust Services Lab Refresh Coming July 9th

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I just got notified that a refresh of the Trust Services Lab is due out on July 9th 2012.  For those of you who don’t know what Trust Services is, it’s a .NET encryption framework for protecting sensitive data stored in Windows Azure Data Management technologies, including SQL Database (formerly known as SQL Azure), Tables and Blobs.  It’s all done using policies and certificates that are managed independently by the developer and an authorized administrator.

Why should you care?  One of the big adoption blockers for building PaaS applications for Windows Azure are concerns over loss of control and data sovereignty.  Trust Services technology will make it possible to encrypt and store your data securely in Windows Azure, and independently define policies that allow only authorized consumers to decrypt the data.  This eliminates the risk of access to sensitive data by any unauthorized entity, including the cloud provider that is hosting your PaaS application.

So what’s new in the July 9th refresh?  Some pretty cool stuff, including:

  • Search on encrypted data
  • Encryption of streams
  • Separation of roles for data policy administration, publishing and consumption

If you previously signed up for the lab, you will have to sign up again to get the July 9th refresh.  We haven’t announced any plans yet for general availability of Trust Services, but this refresh is a good sign that things are progressing well.  Have at it!