Case Study: Textron achieves $2.5M annual storage savings and near‑instant disaster recovery with Microsoft Azure

Manufacturer to Reduce IT Costs by $2.5 Million with Hybrid Cloud Storage

Textron, a diversified manufacturer of aircraft, defense and industrial products with 32,000 employees, faced rapidly rising storage costs and more than 30% annual data growth that threatened its goal to reduce IT spending. Legacy storage held large volumes of older, infrequently used data on expensive platforms, and regulatory constraints prevented a cloud‑only approach.

Textron deployed a hybrid cloud storage solution using Microsoft Azure and Azure StorSimple (four StorSimple appliances plus Azure storage), moving roughly 300 TB of unstructured data to the cloud. The move delivered scalable storage, cut storage costs by about $2.5 million annually (≈80%), and shortened disaster‑recovery times from 48–72 hours to minutes, significantly improving data availability.

Textron

David Ginn

Director of Architecture