One of the key upcoming projects at my company is deploying Windows 10 – both in our virtual desktop infrastructure and mobile devices. The next session was “Windows 10 in the Enterprise” and was a key one for me.

Windows 10 in the Enterprise

Doug Elsley is a Windows 10 Lead – UK Public Sector at Microsoft. He’s been at Microsoft for ten years.

Following on from Brad’s keynote, one of Microsoft’s key strategies is to create more personal computing. To do this they’ve created a platform which spans multiple hardware devices… whether they are PCs, mobile devices, televisions and gaming consoles. Apparently there are more than 200 million devices running Windows 10.

What customers are telling Microsoft

• No more big deployments
• How do I protect my corporate data?
• My users needs access to their apps and data anywhere, anytime
• We want more transparency
• IT budgets are under pressure. Show us how we can cut IT costs

Current enterprise challenges:

• $141-160 per device/year – cost of keeping user devices secure
• 17% of helpdesk costs driven by mobile devices
• $1718 per PC – cost of upgrading Windows XP to Windows 7

Windows 10 invests in business by:

• Being more productive
• Protection against modern security threats
• Innovative devices for your business
• Managed for continuous innovation

The United States Department of Defense are going to upgrade 4 million of the devices to Windows 10 due to improvements Microsoft have made in security.

Doug talks extensively about the Sony leak and the need to replace passwords. Windows Hello and Microsoft Passport will help achieve this.

Credential Guard is a very small virtual machine which runs in the Windows 10 installation. Kinda like a gun box, it stores credentials and cannot be accessed or disabled.

Enterprise Data Protection provides automatic encryption for data, and prevents data from being access on devices which haven’t been previously authorised. Even if data is taken away from the enterprise, it still cannot be access unless it’s on a whitelisted device.

Deployment

Windows 10 heralds the end of the “wipe-and-reload’ deployment. In-place upgrades from a Pro version to Enterprise are now supported. Dynamic provisioning is also a possibility.

Azure AD join enables machines out of the box to authenticate against Azure AD, and can be done in six minutes.

Windows Store for Business utilises Azure AD to ensure users only see apps that have been assigned to the in the Windows Store.

Windows as a Service

Windows 10 is still the last version that will be released.

• Consumer devices
• Business users
• Specialised systems

Microsoft has an ongoing engineering development cycle which feeds into the Windows Insider Preview Branch. After that there’s the Current Branch, followed by the Current Branch for Business.

And finally… a quote from Gartner

“By 2018, 80% of enterprises will run Windows 10. A year ahead of Windows 7”

Up next…

The next session is “Run Azure services in your Datacenter“.