South African Airways (SAA) is addressing rising costs and rapidly evolving markets with smarter IT. By utilizing Windows Server 2012 R2 and Microsoft System Center 2012 R2 to create a private cloud and retire hundreds of physical servers, it has reduced IT costs by US $2.5 million. The fully automated datacenter operations reduce management costs, speed up server and application deployment and assist the company in a highly competitive market. This also helps SAA to avoid server failures and ensure business continuity.