Windows 365 at three years: Customer-centric solutions for security, management and productivity
On the third-year anniversary of Windows 365, we’re reflecting on what our customers have accomplished in the last three years. You have navigated the complex and changing realities of the hybrid workplace, found new ways to move aspects of your business to the cloud, and kept employees and critical business operations connected and running in a challenging cyber security environment. We are grateful to be a part of this journey and to be your partner on the road to the AI and cloud-powered future of work.
Customers told us that business resiliency and continuity was of critical importance, as well as maintaining security and keeping employees productive, all while lowering costs and complexity for IT. From the beginning, our goal with Windows 365 was to ensure corporate data and employee information remain secure and to reduce management overhead for IT, while providing a familiar Windows experience that is flexible and fast to deploy. Windows 365 Cloud PCs enable employees to work from anywhere and access their Windows 11 or Windows 10 desktop, apps, data and settings, on any device.
Companies including FedEx, Regeneron, ING, Carlsberg, Nationwide, Crocs and Kantar have transformed how their employees work and improved their business resilience with Windows 365. Today we are pleased to announce new updates to Windows 365 based on customer feedback and new use cases to keep businesses secure and their employees productive, even in the face of uncertainty and change.
“Windows 365 is easy to use, up-to-date, secure and compliant. And it’s always available, with a seamless experience anywhere.” – Jeffrey van den Burg, product owner (virtual) Cloud Managed Workplace of ING bank
New cloud solutions for business resiliency
Windows 365 is cloud-native, providing customers with the means to keep their teams connected and productive, to better manage their device estate and to maintain business continuity as part of the Windows commercial family of solutions. As John Cable, vice president of Windows Servicing and Delivery, highlighted recently, “Windows must prioritize change and innovation in the area of end-to-end resilience. These improvements must go hand in hand with ongoing improvements in security and be in close cooperation with our many partners, who also care deeply about the security of the Windows ecosystem.”
Read more: Windows resiliency: Best practices and the path forward
We recently introduced cross-region disaster recovery and data resilience for Windows 365 Cloud PCs, providing an additional layer of protection against regional outages. This add-on feature creates “snapshots” of Cloud PCs. These snapshots are placed in customer-defined, geographically distant locations, and they can be recovered to Cloud PCs running in the selected location during a disaster recovery event. This cross-region disaster recovery feature is easily configurable and integrated into existing reports and workflows, providing administrators with robust resilience and streamlined management to ensure business continuity even during challenging scenarios. It also reduces the risk of data loss and allows IT admins to quickly respond to unexpected disruptions. Learn more.
“By continuing to invest in Microsoft infrastructure and deploying Windows 365, we’ve extended our data loss prevention protocols to our Cloud PCs.” – Scott Czarnecki, senior director of Global IT Infrastructure at Crocs.
Customer-centric innovation
Commitment to customer-centric innovation is at the core of Windows. We listen to customer feedback, understand your challenges and strive to deliver solutions that better meet your needs and expectations. We are constantly improving and enhancing Windows 365 with new features, integrations and capabilities based on your input.
One of the most frequent requests from customers is simple managed access to a graphics processing unit (GPU) in a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. Today we are announcing the general availability of Windows 365 GPU-enabled Cloud PCs with support for intensive graphic design, image and video rendering, 3D modeling and data processing or visualization workloads. With the new Windows 365 GPU-enabled Cloud PCs, anyone utilizing graphics intensive workloads has new freedom to produce work, collaborate and share work from Windows in the cloud. Learn more.
Additionally, customers requested a unified app that gives employees one-click access to Windows 365, as well as Azure Virtual Desktop, Microsoft Dev Box and other Microsoft virtualization solutions. Today we are pleased to announce the Windows App will be generally available on Windows, macOS and iOS, and in public preview for Android this fall. With the Windows App, employees get easy, one-button access to their Windows 365 Cloud PCs from any device, allowing them to be productive with Windows wherever they are. And because Windows 365 is the same familiar and complete Windows delivered from the cloud, that means being productive with Copilot as well. Since the launch of the Windows App in preview, we’ve seen over 10 million active hours of usage across platforms adopted by customers such as Zurich Insurance Group and Vodafone.
We are also delighted to announce that AI-powered Windows 365 Cloud PC recommendations are now generally available to help IT administrators easily determine the optimal configuration for each Cloud PC based on employee usage patterns and performance needs, starting from 2vCPU, and going all the way up to the newly available GPU-enabled configurations. Learn more.
“With Windows 365, we’ve ensured that Windows 11 can be deployed using existing tooling, minimizing effort for IT admins and impact on users. Everyone is very happy with Windows 365 and they want even more.” – Oleksii Giriiev, service owner for Endpoint Management and ServiceNow, Carlsberg Group.
Work even more flexibly and securely across any device
Security is paramount when it comes to cloud computing, and that’s why we have invested in numerous solutions to protect employee identity, access and company data on Windows 365. Today we are announcing the latest security updates for Windows 365. Learn more.
- Secure Identity: Granular IT-defined re-authentication policies (remote lock screen and quicker session time limits) help ensure that only authorized people can access your Cloud PC.
- Secure Access: Purview Insider Risk Management with Forensic Evidence helps you detect and mitigate insider threats by monitoring employee activity, identifying risky behaviors and providing evidence for investigations.
- Secure Data: Encryption with Customer Key allows you to encrypt your Cloud PC data at rest and in transit with your own encryption keys, giving you full control and ownership of your data. Unidirectional clipboard prevents data leakage by limiting the direction and type of data of the copy-and-paste actions from the local device to the Cloud PC.
Customers like Crocs adopted Windows 365 for its more than 8,000 employees and contractors. They simplified their systems management, enhanced security and generated incredible financial savings, and they’re not the only ones.
Windows 365 helps you to be ready for AI at work
Windows is the best canvas for the future of AI innovation and productivity – and that extends to Windows in the cloud. First and foremost, Windows 365 ensures all employees can access Microsoft Copilot which can be streamed from the cloud to Windows PCs, Mac, iPhone, iPad and Android devices – with IT controls and data protection. Second, Copilot for Microsoft 365* works on Windows 365 Cloud PCs just like physical PCs, ensuring your employees can enhance their productivity with AI on any device.
Customers, developers and partners are embracing Windows as an open AI platform, creating AI-enabled apps and powerful Copilot+ PCs that will increase the pace of innovation. With Windows 365, all that creativity gets extended to every employee and aspect of our customers’ business.
Our continued commitment to helping customers enable flexible work and empower productivity and creativity is recognized in the most recent IDC MarketScape reports where Microsoft is named a Leader in Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) for 2023-2024. “Microsoft, through both its position as the developer of Windows and its long history in the market, has a broad and deep ecosystem of both relationships and technology related to virtualization.”
“Microsoft’s continued leadership strength, well positioned to support DaaS in enterprises that already use its endpoint or identity management solutions, have users who primarily rely on Microsoft 365 for productivity, or access workloads located in the Azure cloud.” IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Desktop as a Service 2024 Vendor Assessment, By: Shannon Kalvar, June 2024, IDC #US51272024
“The corporate technology experience should match or exceed what you expect from a consumer experience. With Windows 11 Enterprise, Windows 365 and Copilot, we are moving the needle to a simple, frictionless experience that rivals advances in personal technology.” – Prab Greenwood, head of Digital Workforce at Kantar
We continue to build Windows 365 with our customers’ needs in mind. Our goal in Windows is to give you choices, features and tools to drive your business success. We will continue innovating to help keep your business secure, provide a great employee experience and streamline IT management. We’re committed to making productivity from anywhere possible, with an updated, secure and efficient way to manage your endpoint environment. Thank you for your continued trust in and support of Windows 365.
Visit www.windows365.com to learn more.
*Copilot is available in the Home tab of Word, Excel (Preview), PowerPoint and Outlook if you are a Copilot subscriber. If you also have a Microsoft 365 subscription that includes the Microsoft 365 desktop apps then you should find Copilot available in those apps as well.