Morgan Stanley Expands Use of Cloud in Tech Modernization

Morgan Stanley is shifting some of its core workloads to Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud platform as part of a move to accelerate the modernization of its information technology environment. It is also working with Azure to roll out new cloud features that executives of the two companies said will benefit its clients and ultimately the highly regulated financial services industry. The partnership builds on several technology projects that began about two years ago according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. Morgan Stanley said it would move some compute-intensive applications to the cloud, such as risk systems that perform billions of calculations daily. The bank will also move client-facing applications to Azure, as well as data and analytics workloads where they can store petabytes of data on the cloud. Engineers at the two companies plan to roll out new features to improve the time it takes to get products to market and to allow teams at Morgan Stanley to innovate faster. The engineers will also work to roll out a set of security protocols for Azure that will be specifically tailored for the financial services industry and the regulatory environment in which banks operate.