Windows 365, your Cloud PC | What it is, how it works, and how to set it up

 

Windows 365, your Cloud PC | What it is, how it works, and how to set it up

 - Hello and welcome toMicrosoft Mechanics. Coming up, I'm joined by Scott Manchester to take a first look at Windows 365, your PC in the cloud thatlets you securely stream your personalized

 Windows experience, including your desktop, your apps, your settings and your content, at any time to all your devices. And for IT, we're going to show you how as a fully managed service, just how easy it is to assignand configure Cloud PCs using familiar tools likeMicrosoft Endpoint Manager. Alright, so Scott, we'vehad you on the show now quite a few times over the past few years but, now you're back witha special announcement. - Yeah Jeremy, it's been a while. Well, I sure am excitedto have Windows

 365 finally announced today, and I can't wait toshow it in more detail. - That's right, and youknow given the need to work remotely and securely over the past year, we've seen this huge demandfor cloud-based solutions. So what's the significancenow that we're doing here with Windows 365? - So with Windows 365, we are modernizing the waythat Windows experiences are delivered for anyoneon practically any device. 

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Now it's a premium experiencefor both users and IT. It's easy to use and justas

 easy for IT to manage. And this, as you mentioned, is a whole new category ofcomputing we call Cloud PC. Now that said, the bestway for me to explain this is really to show it to you. So for example here, I have mypersonal laptop and my iPad, which is a typical combinationfor many travelers. So I'll use the browserfirst on my Windows laptop and go to windows365.microsoft.com. Now I can see my CloudPC along with its specs. Now it actually has ahigher spec than the laptop I'm connecting from. Now there are also a fewother things you can do from this portal, but I'll show you that in a sec. First, let me launchright into my desktop. So here you can see my personal desktop. It still has my apps, even the

 ones I was usingfrom the last time I was here, and my custom desktop background. Everything my IT departmenthas installed for me is in the Start menu, like Office and Teams, so I'm immediately ready to work. Now, I'll open anotherapp, in this case Excel and here I'll open this periodic table and let's change nickel into gold. All right, we'll come back to that later. Also, everything youconnect to is super fast, whether you're downloading,streaming or uploading content from your Cloud PC. Just to put this into context, the average wirelessconnection speed in the US is around 27 megabits per second. Which is more than enough fora full-fidelity experience to access and use Windows 365, but once I'm in my

 CloudPC things get way faster. I've got a speed test running here and in my case you can see here I've got a crazy fast fivemillisecond ping time, and my download is almost peakingat 10 gigabits per second. And look at that upload speed, it's almost coming up tofour gigabits per second. - And I've gotta say, thoseare pretty amazing speeds and it really shows you that the device that you're connectingto your Cloud PC with doesn't need to have a fast connection, and it also means thatyour Cloud PC's connection is never going to be the bottleneck when it comes to using online services, accessing things via the browser or uploading or downloading content. - That's right, basicallyif you can stream a movie, you

 have enough bandwidthfor a great experience. Now I'll close this browserwindow here on my laptop and I'll pick up exactlywhere I left off on my iPad. Now I'm on my iPad, I'min the Safari browser. And I could launch here from the browser but also we have nativeapps for IOS, Android, Mac and Windows, with Linux on the way. So I'll switch over to the native IOS app connected to my Cloud PC and you'll see it opens exactlyhow I left it in Windows. Now here you can see my speedtest results are still there,

 and in Excel, nickel is still gold. Now in my case, I wentstraight from my Windows PC to my iPad.

 But I could have loggedout on Friday in the US on my laptop, and resumed onMonday in France from my iPad, and the experience wouldhave been exactly the same. - Right, and to be clear, just like you have your own physical PC, this is your own persistentWindows PC in the cloud, so it'll be the same one today or a year from now, aslong as it's still active. - Absolutely, and this reallyopens up new possibilities to securely connect to a persistent and always-ready Windows environment with your

 personalizeddesktops, apps, files and even your settings, all delivered from the Microsoft cloud. - Okay, so if this isrunning in the cloud, can you still get tothings that are in your local office's network, like shared files orfolders, internet apps, you know, where you mighthave to otherwise drive into the office or connect via VPN? - Yeah, you can. We designed Windows 365 from the ground up to fit the hybrid workexperience we've all been living. Now ordinarily, connectingdirectly to your work network with a personal device can introduce risk. And because your Cloud PCscan always be connected to your work network, you don't need to worryabout local or VPN access from a personally owned device. With

 Windows 365, your Cloud PC experienceis effectively the same as if you were in the office. So this is great for anyone, whether you're a front line worker in a high security environment or an everyday or advanceduser working from home or the corporate office, your favorite spot likea cafe or even on the go. It doesn't matter whereyou're working from, you still have a secureand premium experience. - Okay, so we've seen now whatyour personalized Cloud PC looks like, but let's sayit's my first day on the job and you've given me a Cloud PC, then what does that experience look like? - So let me switch backover to that end-user portal and show you the guided experience. Now when a user launches theportal for the

first time, they get a welcome andbrief tour of the portal: what to expect and howto manage their Cloud PC. So let's take a look once I'm logged in. So here again, you cansee your Cloud PC specs and again I can opendirectly from the browser, but I can also manage a few settings here. I can restart, rename andalso troubleshoot any issues I might encounter. Coming soon, admins willoptionally be able to set additional optional settingslike reset and resize, so you can do those actionsright from here as well. -

 Okay, and speaking of our IT admins, who are probably watching right now, what else have you done tomake their lives easier? - Well, for IT this has huge benefits from the management perspective, because you don't need toworry about the infrastructure to set up and managethis type of experience. You don't have to learn newmanagement tools and paradigms. We've built Windows 365 to be consistent with how you manage yourphysical devices now, using Microsoft Endpoint Manager or MEM. In fact, I'm in the AllDevices list in MEM now, and you can see yourphysical and Cloud PCs

 appear side-by-side. Now in my case, I justhappen to have a lot of Cloud PCs running. And I can manage appsand policies from here like any other Windows device. - Okay, so it's a familiar and consistent management experience, just like managing allyour other Windows PCs. But can you walk us throughthe steps it would take to deploy a Cloud PC? - Sure. There are reallyjust two requirements for a user to be assigned a Cloud PC. First, they need a license and second, they need tobe part of an AAD Group that's assigned to a provisioning policy. Let me walk you through that. So you start here in

 theMicrosoft 365 Admin Center, and assign licenses just like you would from any other Microsoft 365 service. And this step could be doneby your licensing admin. Now I'll click into Active Users and assign one to ournew intern, Adele Vance. Now I'll go ahead and give her a Cloud PC, in this case let's do fourcores and 16 gigs of RAM. And while I'm here, I'll alsoset her up with Microsoft 365. Now I have a group for ourinterns already assigned to provisioning policy, so for her account, I canjust add Adele to this group. So you can see she's alreadyin two default groups but now I'll assign a new membership and search for West US, andthere's our intern group. And once I add her, that will kick off theCloud PC

 provisioning and will be ready to use shortly. One of the great things about Windows 365 is that it is offered at afixed price per user per month, like any other Microsoft 365 subscription. So you don't need to agonizeover things like tracking, utilization or keepingidle resources running when people aren't using them. - Got it. So it's more orless the same user licensing experience that you'd beused to for Microsoft 365 but what did you have to doto get that group assignment then to kick off the provisioning process? - So let me show you how we set this up. First in MEM, you can see Ihave 26 machines provisioned and three network connectionsin three different regions. Now in our case, we have setup

 Adele to access her Cloud PC using the West US standardnetwork connection. In our provisioning policies, I'll click into the oneI assigned to this group, and you can see under image, we are using our CuratedWindows 10 20H2 build from the gallery. But also we could have uploaded and selected our own custom image. Adele is assigned to the WestUS interns provisioning policy that contains all of these settings, including the network connection. Now you see the policy name in this case, as a best practice,matches our group name. And in assignments, you'll see the AADGroup of West US Interns we added Adele to earlier. - Can you have more thanone group then assigned to a provisioning policy? -

 Yeah, you can add multiple AAD groups to a provisioning policy. Now if I go back to the Windows 365 tab, we should see all ourexisting provisioned Cloud PCs and a new Cloud PC beingprovisioned for Adele. And she should haveaccess to this Cloud PC in about 20 minutes. - So can I localize then theconnection to just the regions or specific networks where that group should probably have accessthen for the best experience? - That's right, you cancreate network connections in Azure regions that are closest to where your users are physically located for the best performance. Which is great too

 formultinational works. - So once everything is up and running, what do we have then tomonitor health and performance? - I know that's somethingthat's top-of-mind for a lot of people, and this was a huge area of focus for us. So first let's look atthe network connections. We've built analytics into the service to look at health across your VNETs and domain connections,as you can see here, to make sure your Cloud PC'susers can reach everything they need to on yournetwork to be productive. And once you've configureda network connection, our watchdog servicecontinually runs diagnostics to ensure

 connections areup and running at all times. Now if a diagnostic checkfails, we'll alert you and even give you suggestionsfor how to correct the issue. Now we've also built rich,out-of-the-box reporting and analytics for Cloud PCs. This enables admins to take actions to improve end-user performance and can reduce calls to your help desk. So here's how this works. So I'll go into the newremoting connection report, and this lists out key performance metrics for connecting to your Cloud PCs and the impact on the user's experience. For example, with Cloud PC sign-in time, we see the total time toconnect to the

 Cloud PC. And round trip time KPI showsyou the speed and reliability of network connectionsfrom the user locations. So next, if I click into theresource performance report, I can see whether my CPUand memory configurations are optimal across my Cloud PC users. And I can drill into device performance for even more details. Well, here I'll select this Cloud PC, and I can see it shows a poorperformance score of only 18. Now the ideal score should besomewhere around 50 or higher. So I can resolve this

 byadding more memory or CPU to this Cloud PC for the user. - So are you able then tochange the Cloud PC specs to match the demand on that device? - Yes, you can. And you know, not all userswill have the same needs and the user might evenstart out being fine with the basic level CloudPC but then outgrow it. And this ability to upgradeis new with Cloud PC. To help you know when youmight want to upgrade, we give you the rightvisibility and information before a user calls you for support. To resize

 this Cloud PC, I just need to click on the recommendation and select the rightsize for this Cloud PC, and I'll select resize. And I can change it tohave more virtual cores, memory or storage. For example, I couldchoose an option here with let's say eight cores and then resize. And once the change is made, the next time the user logs in, it will get this new spec. - Nice, but I really wantto switch gears to security and compliance though. How do we make sure that our Cloud PCs meet our requirements? - Well, like the rest of ourMicrosoft cloud services, we've made Windows 365surface itself compliant in the region

 andindustries we operate in. And you can find the latestinfo on the trust center at microsoft.com/trust. From a security perspective, of course a primary benefit is that, your Cloud PC isabstracted from the device you're using to access it. So as an admin you havefull control over the data in the Cloud PC and can prevent people fromcopying data to their local PC. Now beyond that, Windows 365 follows theZero Trust security model. For example, you can usemulti-factor authentication to explicitly verify any login or access attempt to a Cloud PC. And you can pair this withconditional access policies to assess login

 riskinstantly for each session. Now we've also designed theuser and admin experiences around the principles ofleast privileged access. So for example, you candelegate specific functions like licensing, device management,and Cloud PC management using specific roles, so you don't need to be a global admin. You can use the baselines fromMicrosoft Defender and Edge just like you would foryour physical devices. And we've built a Windows365-specific security baseline to help you get started quickly. And of course, MicrosoftDefender for Endpoint also works seamlessly with your Cloud PC.

 Also, as you would expect, encryption is applied across the board for all data at rest and in transit. - So this makes it a lot easier then to securely deliver Windows experiences to just about any device, and really anyone with adevice management background can add Cloud PCs totheir device landscape. - Right, we took a ton ofinput from our early adopters, combined with our experiences from delivering other desktop services to make Windows 365 manageable for both small and large organizations. And

 you can use your familiartools with rich controls. Now everything I've shown youtoday is part of our vision to transform the PC experienceso that you can work remotely or in hybrid office environments, securely and from any device. - So the overall experiencethen is pretty game changing for both end-users and IT, so congrats to you and the team, but how can the folkswatching try out Windows 365 for themselves? - Well, we'll be launchingWindows 365 in early August, so depending on when you're

 watching this, it's either super close orgenerally available already. Just go to microsoft.com/Windows365to get started. - Awesome stuff. Thanks so muchfor joining us today Scott, and always great to have you on. So, to stay up to datewith the latest news and see the tech in action, be sure  Microsoft Mechanics, and as always thanks so much