Azure gains anti-piracy FACT certification

Dave W. Shanahan

Microsoft is heavily invested in global anti-piracy initiatives and looks to extend those efforts to their individual customers. Today, Microsoft’s Azure announced its certification with the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT). Currently, Azure is the first public cloud service that has the FACT certification.

Watching pirated content online costs the entertainment industry billions of dollars every year and Microsoft is looking to curb this behavior. As more things like entertainment content distribution and production processes move to the public cloud, like Azure, Microsoft sees the importance of investing in protection services to try to stop this online piracy.

Microsoft’s FACT certification is the latest in a number of efforts that Microsoft is implementing to insure the security of data in the cloud, both for enterprise and individual customers. Microsoft has already completed other security measures for Azure Media Services, CDN, Storage, and other platforms’ capabilities.

All this work is being done to make Microsoft compliant with the already established best-practices for the entertainment industry. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) already has application and cloud security best-practices in place to safeguard their content, like the Content Delivery and Security Association’s (CDSA) Content Protection and Security (CPS) Standard.

Microsoft is looking to improve upon these standards and look for new ways to fight piracy within Azure. For more information on how Microsoft meets MPAA’s best-practices, take a look in the Microsoft Trust Center.