Last month, Microsoft hosted its annual Inspire conference and as expected, a broad range of exciting announcements were made about the future direction of the company and the new offerings set to launch over the coming months. The list of announcements was extensive, but the key themes were security, hybrid working enablement with a big focus on virtualisation. As for new offerings, the Microsoft team shared their plans around moving Windows to the cloud, building their holistic security platform and further many new developments to their Azure offering. If you were unable to log into some of the sessions yourself, we’ve rounded up some of the key new developments for you here.  

Windows 365:  

What is Windows 365?  

Microsoft describes Windows 365 as “the world’s first cloud PC”. It’s a solution that will deliver a full, personalised PC experience from the cloud to any device, giving workers and organisations power, simplicity and security for hybrid work. 

What does this mean for organisations: 

No additional VDI resource is required to deploy Windows 365 and you will now be able to deploy automated OS updates automatically and in a matter of minutes. Employees can pick up their work exactly where they left off on any device whilst maintaining their personalised Windows desktop experience. Windows 365 is also expected to drastically reduce costs across the board. For more information, you can read the full overview from Microsoft.  

Windows 11

What is Windows 11? 

Windows 11 is an upcoming major version of the Windows NT operating system, due to be released later this year.  

What does this mean for organisations? 

Windows 11 is centred around improving security, increasing productivity, and promoting connectivity within an organisation. Aside from big visual and UX improvements, employees will now have secure, multifactor single sign-on from devices to the cloud and apps and more robust security designed for remote work.  Read more from Microsoft on Windows 11. 

Azure Arc

What is Azure Arc? 

Azure Arc simplifies governance and management by delivering a consistent multi-cloud and on-premises management platform. Azure Arc enables you to: 

• Manage your entire environment, with a single pane of glass, by projecting your existing non-Azure, on-premises, or other cloud resources into Azure Resource Manager
• Manage virtual machines, Kubernetes clusters, and databases as if they are running in Azure. 
• Use familiar Azure services and management capabilities, regardless of where they live. 
• Continue using traditional ITOps, while introducing DevOps practices to support new cloud-native patterns in your environment. 
• Configure Custom Locations as an abstraction layer on top of Azure Arc enabled Kubernetes cluster, cluster connect, and cluster extensions.
  

 What does this mean for organisations? 

Today, companies struggle to control and govern increasingly complex environments. These environments extend across data centres, multiple clouds, and edge. Each environment and cloud possesses its own set of disjointed management tools that you need to learn and operate. With Azure Arc, organisations can standardise and streamline the management overheads associated with multi or hybrid cloud. You can learn more about Azure Arc. 

To Conclude

So what do these updates mean for our customers? Our Head of Technology Dan Williams says, “Microsoft Inspire is a huge event for us and all of our customers, it allows us to evaluate new service offerings and increase the value we provide to our customers. The latest announcements are incredibly exciting and we look forward to introducing the bleeding edge technology our partners allow us to work with.”  

For more information about these new products, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team