At Morgan Stanley, TBM framework enables public cloud adoption

The varied cost of public cloud adoption may not seem compatible with the desire to track each penny spent through the technology business management (TBM) framework.

But at Morgan Stanley, the TBM framework helps rein in public cloud spend to realize benefits.

"From a Morgan Stanley cloud strategy perspective, TBM is to define a consistent methodology that will help assess commercial viability and feasibility for cloud," said Tas Sarwar, technology business receiver transparency and demand management lead at Morgan Stanley, at the TBM Conference 2020 on Wednesday.

With this consistent methodology in place, Morgan Stanley balances the benefits of public cloud adoption with the financial due diligence necessary for TBM, according to Sarwar. Through TBM, Morgan Stanley gained a better understanding of the cloud value framework, built a budget mechanism to influence consumption and behavior of the cloud and adopted cloud best practices.

With TBM, technology departments take on the financial responsibility of tracking tech spend to develop a holistic, data-driven view of the budget.

Some organizations prefer a private cloud model to keep the tech internal or a hybrid methodology to realize the benefits of both models. Companies may also prefer other spending methodologies to keep budget decisions with the financial department.

At Morgan Stanley, the use of TBM to influence cloud adoption led to more dynamic consumption, robust but flexible cost management and closer collaboration between business and technology departments, according to Sarwar.

"Public cloud is not necessarily cost efficient by default," Sarwar said. "So therefore, any optimization action has a near real-time financial impact."

To manage cloud via TBM, Morgan Stanley built a cloud value framework, Sarwar said. The framework considers several tenets of TBM and cloud adoption to drive business value:

Agility to rapidly provision services
Resiliency and performance to implement business continuity architectures
Flexibility for dynamic application performance
Elastic pricing
Enhanced security and compliance
Cost transparency around usage
Application development enabling developer productivity
Access to a wide range of tech to foster innovation

Morgan Stanley also used TBM to internally develop software lifecycle management practices, according to Anna Gitelman, head of global TBM at Morgan Stanley, at the same conference.

"TBM facilitates the transition to agile, which will improve productivity, time to market and proximity to the firm's clients," Gitelman said.

"Cost transparency and demand management provides powerful information to the business, transparently demonstrating total cost of ownership of all tech products, services and applications," said Gitelman.