In January 2025, we met with Oak Group to review the early outcomes of their Azure migration and discuss how their evolving technology strategy continues to support their ambitious transformation goals.
Since forming as the result of five owner-managed businesses joining forces in 2019, with a heritage dating back to 1999, Oak Group has only continued to grow.
Under the private ownership of Opera, Oak Group is now a team of more than 250 employees working across five jurisdictions – Guernsey, Jersey, Isle of Man, Mauritius, and most recently The Bahamas – the Group is continually transforming, empowering its people with new technologies, and aiming to better serve its clients every day.
Staying relevant
When Group CEO Kim Sgarlata joined Oak Group in 2023, she was given a mandate to drive transformation and best prepare the business for the future. A key tenet of that transformation was establishing a cloud platform that would enable its employees to deliver exceptional service, empower its clients to take control of their assets, and enable the business to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive market.
Oak Group’s initial engagement with Cloud Direct kickstarted that transformation, as it migrated from a private, locally hosted data centre into Microsoft Azure, and adopted other Microsoft technologies in Azure Virtual Desktop and Intune.
Platform for growth
The new cloud platform that Cloud Direct established for Oak Group laid the foundations for its ambitious growth goals. With expansions and acquisitions in their sights, an agile cloud environment would enable smooth onboarding and the replication of its processes across offices and jurisdictions – even when they were the other side of the globe.
With expansion of the business enabled, so too was expansion of its technology suite. Migrating to Microsoft Azure has also enabled Group CTO John Doublard to explore the possibilities presented by data and artificial intelligence initiatives, such as the opportunity to unlock greater efficiencies with Microsoft Fabric and extract more value from the Group’s data.
Empowering people
While innovation is at the forefront of everything Oak Group does, it is ultimately a people business – as noted by CEO Kim Sgarlata. Oak Group’s technological transformation is driven by its commitment to empowering its people.
With improved capabilities, more efficient processes, and greater control in the hands of the user, time is freed up to spend working with clients and create a more personable, more effective service offering. By putting new data capabilities, automation, and opportunities for optimisation in the hands of their employees – all of which are enabled by laying its cloud foundations – Oak Group performs better across the board.
