Ocorian, which manages £275bn in assets and serves 9,000 clients globally, had grown its Azure use quickly enough that its existing setup was creating friction around permissions management and the segregation of applications and services. The organisation needed a more structured foundation before it could continue scaling without compounding that complexity.
Working with ANS, Ocorian rebuilt its Azure environment around an enterprise landing zone model. The number of Azure subscriptions grew from two to 19, giving the business greater control over how workloads are managed, isolated and governed. The migration was completed without any recorded downtime.
Stuart Geddes, CIO at Ocorian, said: "Cloud is probably our single most important piece of infrastructure. How we use cloud is how we're going to win, so as our use of Azure evolved rapidly, we needed to make sure we had the right foundations in place to scale."
Geddes described Ocorian as now a cloud-centric organisation, adding that the business evaluates Azure as its first option whenever it considers growth, new capability or additional capacity. ANS is positioned as a strategic partner in that ongoing work.
The new architecture is also intended to support the adoption of emerging technologies. Ocorian is currently exploring Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft’s platform for building and deploying enterprise AI applications, as part of its interest in AI capabilities. That exploration sits within a broader technology strategy rather than as the sole driver of the rearchitecture.
Neil Stewart, Senior Enterprise Account Executive at ANS, said: "As organisations move more of their operations and services into the cloud, they need an environment that can scale without creating additional complexity."
ANS holds Microsoft’s current UK Partner of the Year title and is headquartered in Manchester. The firm described the engagement as a collaboration built on combining Azure technical expertise with an understanding of the regulated environments in which financial services organisations operate. Part of the arrangement involved ANS working alongside Ocorian’s internal teams to build in-house cloud capabilities rather than creating an ongoing external dependency.
The transformation is representative of a pattern common in financial services, where cloud governance and workload segregation become pressing concerns as estates grow beyond initial deployments. Moving from two to 19 Azure subscriptions in a single project is a substantial structural change: it provides dedicated environments for different business units, regulatory boundaries or geographies, rather than managing all workloads within a flat account structure. The zero-downtime delivery is notable given the volume of assets under administration.
Ocorian’s technology strategy now treats Azure as primary infrastructure for expansion. The redesigned landing zone is designed to reduce the governance overhead that typically builds up as cloud environments scale.
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