Case Study: Smithfield Foods achieves 60% lower datacenter costs and faster application delivery with Microsoft Azure

Mixed grill: Smithfield Foods runs its $15 billion pork business using a hybrid cloud

Smithfield Foods, the $15 billion pork producer, needed more agility than its outsourced datacenters could provide. Using Microsoft Azure and a hybrid cloud model, the company aimed to modernize IT, support global operations, and keep applications and data available for employees in plants, warehouses, offices, and other locations.

Microsoft Azure implemented a mix of services including Azure Virtual Machines, Azure ExpressRoute, Azure Active Directory, Azure Backup, Azure Site Recovery, and Azure Log Analytics to connect systems securely, improve performance, and manage hybrid workloads. The results were significant: Smithfield cut datacenter costs by 60 percent, reduced server infrastructure from over 1,200 to 650, shrank application count from 320 to 98, sped new-application delivery from 30–60 days to one day, and eliminated daily outages with zero downtime.

Smithfield Foods

Julia Anderson

Global Chief Information Officer