Case Study: Smithfield Foods achieves lower datacenter costs and faster application delivery with Microsoft Corporation

Smithfield Foods runs its $14 billion pork business using a hybrid cloud

Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer and processor, needed a faster, more flexible way to run its $15 billion business as its datacenter infrastructure became costly and hard to scale. Using Microsoft Corporation’s Azure hybrid cloud platform and services like Azure Active Directory, ExpressRoute, and Virtual Machines, Smithfield set out to support thousands of employees, hundreds of applications, and operations spread across factories, warehouses, and global offices.

Microsoft Corporation implemented a hybrid Azure environment that connected on-premises systems to the cloud while keeping latency-sensitive plant and warehouse apps local. The result was a 60% cut in datacenter costs, new application delivery time reduced from 30–60 days to one day, stronger security, and zero downtime. Smithfield also consolidated servers from over 1,200 to 650 and reduced applications from 320 to 98, while gaining better visibility and optimization through Azure analytics and automation tools.

Smithfield Foods

Julia Anderson

Global Chief Information Officer