Case Study: Rio Tinto achieves 30% IT cost savings and greater agility with Microsoft Azure

Rio Tinto mines new frontiers of efficiency and agility in the cloud

Rio Tinto, a 144‑year‑old global mining leader with about 55,000 employees operating across 40 countries, faced intense margin pressure from volatile commodity prices, currency swings and regulatory risks. To hit an ambitious target to recoup $5 billion through productivity and operational savings, the company needed to cut costs, increase cash flow and gain IT agility to respond faster to market changes.

Working with Accenture and Microsoft, Rio Tinto moved critical systems to Azure—migrating 24 SAP applications and 35 TB of data in a 75‑hour cutover and building an Azure IaaS estate with more than 1,000 VMs and a petabyte of storage—while rolling out Microsoft 365, Intune and Azure AD for secure mobile work. The cloud shift enabled vacating four datacenters and reduced IT operating costs by about 30%, sped infrastructure provisioning from weeks/months to days, accelerated IoT and analytics pilots, and created a scalable foundation for ongoing innovation and employee engagement.

Rio Tinto

Debbie Wilson

Head of End User Experience