Case Study: Steelcase achieves 46% lower SAN storage costs and 75% faster backup/restore with Microsoft Azure

Office Furniture Supplier Reduces Storage Costs, Restore Times with Cloud-Integrated Solution

Steelcase, a Fortune 1000 workplace furniture manufacturer with about 10,000 employees and $2.87B in revenue, faced slow, unreliable SharePoint backups and rising storage costs—backups took 24–36 hours, restores over two hours, and a full recovery could exceed two days. The company needed a more efficient, cost-effective data protection and disaster recovery solution for global operations.

Steelcase deployed a hybrid cloud storage solution using StorSimple integrated with Microsoft Azure to externalize SharePoint BLOBs, deduplicate and compress data, and replicate remote file shares with automated cloud snapshots. The rollout cut SAN storage costs by 46%, halved administrative overhead, sped backup/restore operations by 75% (individual DB restores by 87%), delivered a tested disaster recovery plan, and paid for itself quickly through license savings.

Steelcase

Roger Dore

Manager, Technical Services and Operations