As it says in the introduction, I'm James Boustead.
I'm a
Managing Director at Morgan Stanley,
which, if you've not heard of them,
they're quite a large global financial services firm.
And I run a technology organization called
Legal, Compliance, and Governance Technology.
And one of the responsibilities of my organization is
to support Morgan Stanley's
anti-corruption, bribery and global financial crime organization.
And that's quite a big deal, not just for Morgan Stanley, but for our regulators.
And there are certain things that as a large, globally significant financial institution
that we are regulatorily mandated to have in place.
And one of those things is what we call our Single Client View.
We have to have a view across the entire enterprise of Morgan Stanley,
all our businesses in all the countries all around the world of a customer.
And what do we know about our customer?
Now, my personal relationship and Morgan Stanley's relationship
with Palantir dates back to around 2013.
And we had Gotham as our tool of choice for managing our Single Client View.
Now.
Gotham is a great tool, but I think it's fair to say
when we started looking at Foundry, we were on a relatively,
our Gotham implementation was a little, wasn't as up to date
as it could have been.
So we had some decisions to make.
Do we look to upgrade Gotham or do we look at Foundry?
And one of the things we did was we put Foundry through
a very intense evaluation and we had architects look at it
and make a decision and that this is our sort of why Foundry.
There's lots of reasons why Foundry is a great tool,
but there's plenty of people from Palantir who can sell Foundry,
you don't need me to do that.
But there were really three things for us
that made Foundry our tool of choice to be our new Single Client View solution.
one was the data management capabilities.
Financial crime is a data intensive problem.
Having a single view of a client across an enterprise as large as Morgan Stanley,
hundreds of countries, 18,000 people, millions of accounts,
is a data problem.
Modern technology stack.
One of the things that we liked about Foundry
was we could incorporate it into the Morgan Stanley ecosystem.
It's an API driven platform.
It's not a full stack solution where I have to use the backend, the frontend, the UI.
I can build my own UI as against the Palantir API
and I can make it look to my client base or my user base
as if they're in a Morgan Stanley system,
even though it's powered by Foundry in the background.
And then the final thing from our perspective
is there's this really cool tool that comes as part of Foundry, and it's called Slate.
And what Slate allowed us to do
was very rapidly we could test the Foundry APIs,
we could test the search capabilities,
even though we hadn't actually built the Morgan Stanley UI
that would sit on top of those APIs.
So it was a real accelerator from our perspective.
So this is our why Foundry.
Now, multiple times you've heard people say this morning
that no plan survives first contact.
And this is where I'm going to start our Foundry journey
with our plan, not surviving first contact.
So.
June 30th, 2021.
Date that's etched in my memory.
This was going to be our Foundry go live date.
This is what we're committed to.
We have great partnerships with Palantir.
Everyone was very excited about it.
We had an aging Gotham implementation
that we wanted to take out of production.
Palantir wanted us to take it out of production.
We wanted to take it out of production.
We were going to go live with Foundry June the 30th according to our plan.
Now.
Foundry is very much designed around cloud deployments.
There are lots of great capabilities in Foundry
that lend itself really well to cloud deployments,
but does present places like Morgan Stanley with some challenges
when it comes to an on prem deployment, which is what we were going with.
So we had some software development lifecycle changes.
That were challenging for us, which introduced some delays to our plan.
So we weren't going to make June the 30th.
So so our Gotham implementation is a little stale
Palantir are concerned with the fact it's on old hardware.
We're concerned with the fact it's on old hardware,
with old operating systems that we collectively feel is a potential security threat
that obviously we don't want to be exposed to.
This is an application that the regulators tell us we have to have up,
so we can't just turn it off.
But we're going to be two months late on our Foundry deliverable.
So this is the start of our perfect storm.
What we agree with our partners in Palantir is
we're not going to do anything to our production environment where Gotham is running.
We're not going to reboot servers.
We're not going to change the environment in any way.
We're going to lock it down for two months
and we're all going to get our heads down and we're going to get Foundry live.
That was the next bit of the plan that didn't survive first contact.
So we get to August the 31st.
And Morgan Stanley security architecture turns around and says.
Bit of a problem with Foundry,
which was perfect timing for them as we were about to go live.
And that problem was
Foundry communicates with something called the Apollo service.
And what it does is it sends telemetry out to the Apollo service.
And then the Apollo service can determine
what it can do to that Foundry implementation to make it more efficient.
It can deploy patches, it can deploy configuration changes,
but these are deployed into the production environment.
And Morgan Stanley security architecture had some concerns with that.
So.
What do we do?
Well --
Well I was stuck.
So the concern was around
something coming into the production environment that could have a destabilizing effect
on the Morgan Stanley production environment.
A very, a very real concern.
So.
We agreed.
And these things sound easy to say.
There was hours and hours behind us,
but we actually agreed a risk acceptance where we could put Foundry
into production in a production parallel mode with a small group of users.
Just so it's running in parallel with Gotham.
So we can test that everything works
and make sure that once we can get around this security concern, we can go live.
September the 18th.
The next thing that we hadn't anticipated.
Hits our plan.
So I know the comments around plans not surviving first contact.
I think Mike Tyson said everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.
September the 18th was when I got punched in the face, metaphorically speaking.
We'd agreed with Palantir that we weren't
going to do anything to our Gotham environment because of the risks around it.
Due to another regulatory initiative that Morgan Stanley had to comply with.
We had to upgrade the hardware that our Gotham system was running on.
So now we've got a problem.
We can't do anything to this environment.
We can't take down the application
because the regulators say we have to have it up
and we can't continue to run on the infrastructure the way it is
because the regulators won't allow us to do that.
So this is where the perfect storm is starting to play out.
So what d
o we do?
And every single thing that happened along this timeline, by the way,
is about security, whether it's from Palantir's side or Morgan Stanley's side.
It's all about how we make sure this is secure.
But at the same time.
The thing that got us through this was the partnership.
Every one of these events that I'm talking about, as I'm sure you can imagine,
we're generating lots of
stress, it's fair to say.
And in times of stress, as the title will say, that's when it tests the partnership.
And at every step on this journey, we had to make compromises.
Morgan Stanley had to make compromises here.
Palantir had to make compromises.
Morgan Stanley security don't make compromises.
Sorry.
One for the firm.
Which really focused us on how to do this right.
September the 21st was a breakthrough date for us.
We got a risk acceptance from Morgan Stanley Security architecture.
The Cyber Infrastructure and Governance Committee told us that
we could go live in production with Foundry.
Woohoo.
If and only if the Apollo Service was disabled.
So it wasn't ideal.
What this meant was we were effectively going to go in
with a version of the software that was going to be static.
We couldn't get patches, we couldn't get updates,
we couldn't get efficiency configuration changes.
We would have to monitor it manually
because we weren't sending the telemetry back to Apollo for the automated monitoring.
But we could go live.
And they will give us a risk acceptance for 12 months.
To figure this out.
So this was the first maybe the first night I slept in the month of September 20, 21.
So this was a big deal for us.
And we went live across our entire client base on October the fourth, 2021.
The key thing that this enabled us to do
was to decommission our Gotham infrastructure before October the 31st,
which was the date that we would have had
to update the infrastructure that it was running on
in order to meet the all the regulatory obligation.
So from our perspective, we're out of the woods.
We've got this thing live.
Foundry's there.
All our users are on it.
We've got our Single Client View application.
The regulators are happy.
We don't have an infrastructure over here that doesn't have encrypted disks on it.
That's all being decommissioned by the end of the year, by the end of October.
So those regulators are happy.
And then what happens next?
Punch in the face.
It's called log4j.
log4j happened -- I think the zero day vulnerability was December the 13th, 2021.
Okay.
The version of Foundry that we were live with in production
had the library version 4.12 -- 2.14, sorry, which had the vulnerability in it.
Okay.
So patch it.
I can't patch it because I've got the Apollo service disabled.
Turn on the Apollo.
Take the patch.
I can't do that.
Because I get fired.
Which was a big deal for me personally.
So we find ourselves presented with another perfect storm.
Again, this is where partnership came into it.
And we work closely with Palantir and we managed
a temporary fix.
The vulnerable code was still in the production implementation,
but what Palantir did is they changed startup parameters around Foundry,
so it bypassed those libraries.
So from Morgan Stanley's perspective,
we had a solution in place that was acceptable to Morgan Stanley security.
We still have the vulnerable libraries in our production environment,
but we could demonstrate that they were not being invoked.
Oops.
Because of our partnership with Palantir.
So that took us through 2021.
February the 25th of this year.
Morgan Stanley Engineering and Palantir Engineering had come up with a solution
which we felt would get Morgan Stanley security,
the Cyber Infrastructure Governance Committee, this infamous body,
happy with a proposal that would allow us to change our deployment
and turn on the Apollo service in production.
Morgan Stanley CISO -- Chief Information Security Officer --
I learned all these acronyms during this journey,
he personally signed off on this architecture approach,
and this was something that we came up with collectively.
So that period of time, between December 2021 and February 2022,
we went all off enjoying our year end holiday,
our engineers and Palantir's engineers were working feverishly on what we can do
that's going to that's going to get this governing body happy.
What we decided was the right implementation,
was we were going to put Palantir into a separate networked environment
within the Morgan Stanley environment
so that we could enable Internet access out,
but it could only connect to the Apollo Server.
And if anything bad
were to come down from the Apollo Server.
It will be restricted within that network environment
and couldn't affect the broader Morgan Stanley production environment.
Everyone was happy with that, which was wonderful.
And on August the 22nd, we went live.
With a fully built out --
new, because we had to go and get a whole load of infrastructure --
we had to build a whole new network domain.
We couldn't turn off our existing production implementation,
so we had to build this plane while the other plane was still flying.
We built out the network space we built at the new Foundry implementation.
We turned on the Apollo service.
We got all the nice updates that came through the patches.
The log4j libraries disappeared out of the production environment,
and on August the 22nd we went live.
So what now?
Finally, we could collectively
turn our energies
to some of the benefits of being on Foundry.
After this year journey and we are now working with our partners in Palantir
to look at other capabilities in the financial crime space that we can
leverage the platform on that data for.
This is the type of conversation we want it to be able to have 12 months earlier.
But as I say, security meant that we had to rely on our
excellent partnership to navigate us through a perfect storm.
And that's time.
Thank you very much.