Each year, Morgan Stanley chooses just one technology solution with innovative capabilities that “materially transform technology at Morgan Stanley and result in better service for its clients” to receive its prestigious “CTO Award for Innovation.” This year, Morgan Stanley chose Zscaler.
I was honored to accept the award on behalf of Zscaler, and I believe it’s a testament to the partnership our teams have built. But it also speaks to Morgan Stanley’s technological vision as the company reaches new milestones in its transformation to the cloud.
When we talk to customers about what they are trying to achieve as they migrate to Office 365 or replace their VPNs and other hardware, the conversation almost always evolves into a broader discussion about their journey to become a more cloud-centric or even cloud-first business.
A cloud transformation is no small task, but the companies that get it right start with a simple but important concept: there is no such thing as a trusted network. I wrote on this topic recently, contending that we need to accept the Internet as the new corporate network. Applications are in the cloud, data is stored in the cloud, and users are accessing resources from everywhere. Taken together, these realities make the internal network barely distinguishable from the external network.
To make cloud successful, therefore, security and IT teams need to come together and develop a new architectural approach in which software-defined policies, not networks, securely connect the right user to the right app or service.
As a highly regulated business with a large global footprint, Morgan Stanley instinctively understood the role security must play in its transformation to the cloud. Zscaler teams have been able to help Morgan Stanley make significant headway in providing a secure, fast, and consistent user experience — no matter where users connect or where applications and services reside.
With this award, Morgan Stanley singles out “innovation” as the key quality that it values most from its partners; innovation is not about incremental change but about sweeping progressive change, and we are humbled to be on this journey together with our partners and customers.
