Certyo vs Azure Confidential Ledger
Microsoft's TEE-based ledger offers hardware-backed isolation. But vendor lock-in, scale limits, and opaque verification create real trade-offs for regulated operations.
What is Azure Confidential Ledger?
Azure Confidential Ledger (ACL) is a managed, decentralized ledger built on Microsoft Research's Confidential Consortium Framework (CCF). It runs exclusively on hardware-backed Trusted Execution Environments (Intel SGX enclaves), providing tamper-proof, append-only storage.
ACL's unique value is hardware-level trust exclusion: TLS terminates inside the enclave, and not even Microsoft cloud operators can access data during processing. Each transaction produces a cryptographic receipt backed by the Merkle tree data structure.
What ACL does well
- TEE hardware isolation: Intel SGX enclaves ensure that data in processing is protected from cloud operator insiders — the strongest confidentiality guarantee available.
- Immediate immutability: Writes are immutable on commit, with no waiting period for batch accumulation or blockchain confirmation.
- Azure ecosystem integration: Native integration with Azure SQL Ledger, Azure Blob Storage, and Microsoft Defender for Cloud.
Limitations and lock-in
Despite its strong isolation model, ACL has significant constraints for teams operating across clouds or needing vendor-neutral evidence:
- Azure lock-in: ACL works only within Azure. Organizations on AWS, GCP, or on-premises cannot use it. Multi-cloud architectures are excluded entirely.
- Scale constraints: Limited to 2 ledger instances per subscription, 50,000 collection IDs per ledger, and 1,800 writes per second. Requesting higher limits requires contacting Microsoft directly.
- Opaque verification: Verification requires Azure API access. Third-party auditors, regulators, or partners need Azure credentials to validate integrity — no public proof exists.
- Survivability risk: If Microsoft discontinues ACL (as AWS did with QLDB), all data and proofs become inaccessible. There is no independent verification path.
Where Certyo wins
Certyo takes a fundamentally different approach: instead of trusting a cloud provider's hardware to protect your data, it makes proof public and platform-independent.
- Public verifiability: Anyone can verify a record's integrity using PolygonScan and an IPFS gateway — no Certyo account, API key, or platform access needed.
- Zero data custody: Certyo stores SHA-256 hashes, not your actual data. This eliminates the PHI/PII custody concern entirely, simplifying HIPAA and GDPR compliance.
- Vendor-neutral permanence: On-chain anchors on Polygon and IPFS manifests persist even if Certyo ceases operations. Your proof outlives the platform.
- Full multi-tenancy: Tenant + client sub-partitioning, 8 RBAC roles, per-API-key rate limiting, and complete audit isolation — built for SaaS-grade operations.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Certyo | Azure ACL |
|---|---|---|
| Trust model | Decentralized (Polygon + IPFS) | Semi-decentralized (TEE enclaves) |
| Public verifiability | PolygonScan + IPFS | No —Requires Azure API access |
| TEE isolation | No —Not applicable | Intel SGX enclaves |
| Data custody | Hash-only (zero PHI/PII) | Full entry storage |
| Vendor lock-in | None (open protocols) | Full (Azure only) |
| Survivability | On-chain is permanent | Single vendor risk |
| Scale limits | Kafka-parallelized (configurable) | 2 instances/sub, 1,800 TPS |
| Multi-tenancy | Full (tenant + client + 8 RBAC roles) | Basic (collection IDs) |
| Immutability latency | Deferred (~minutes) | Immediate on commit |
| Evidence export | Compliance-ready packages | No —Not available |
| Event streaming | Kafka-native pipeline | No —Synchronous API only |
| Rate limiting | Per-API-key distributed | SKU-level limits |
| Pricing | Deployment-flexible (self-hosted or managed; not per-record) | ~$90/month per instance |
| Retry & DLQ | Exponential backoff + DLQ | No —Not available |
| Cross-cloud support | Any cloud or on-premises | No —Azure only |
Need vendor-neutral integrity?
Talk to our team about adding publicly verifiable proof to your existing systems — works across any cloud.