Microsoft has aggregated all the information about its cloud services into one single point of reference, in an attempt to clarify and simplify the increasingly ethereal nature of the cloud.

The announcement, in a blog on the company web site, comes in the same week that one of the new incarnations of HP, Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE), repositioned itself as a reseller of Microsoft’s Azure public cloud services.

With the onset of the cloud industry reshaping both the IT industry and companies, the software company turned cloud service vendor has moved to clarify the picture for enterprise buyers.

The new Microsoft Trust Center aims to unify all the different strands of its enterprise cloud services, as confused customers customer began to clamour for a single version of the truth, instead of having to choose between multiple references issued by a choice of Microsoft trusted resources. In the new scheme, the Microsoft Trust Center will be a consistent source of information about all its enterprise cloud services, such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Office 365.

The Microsoft blog post says the Trust Center will be built on security, privacy and control, compliance and transparency. To this end it will advise cloud buyers on how Microsoft’s cloud services will observe international and regional standards, privacy and data protection policies and security features and function.

On Tuesday it was announced that HPE was to become a Microsoft Azure reseller partner, while in return HPE will become a preferred cloud services provider when Microsoft customers need help. The new arrangement, revealed by HPE CEO Meg Whitman in a quarterly analyst call, illustrates how the IT industry is being reshaped around the new hybridisation of computing services. The arrangement means HPE can sell its own hardware and cloud computing software to companies for the private, ‘on-premise’ part of the private-public combination. Meanwhile, the public cloud will be provided by Microsoft’s Azure computing service.

Transparency, according to the Microsoft Trust Center blog, is to be one of the foundations of cloud services.