Customers embracing and expanding Cloud Endpoints solutions

Cyclotron is a Microsoft partner providing consulting services to clients of all sizes across the full Microsoft stack. Following the pandemic-driven shift to remote work, Cyclotron saw a marked uptick in requests for Cloud Endpoints solutions. “We’d definitely had a steady stream of projects previously, but they were generally smaller implementations,” said Scott Winslow, Identity and Devices Manager at Cyclotron. “When companies had to go out and buy huge numbers of new laptops for their employees to enable working from home, they very quickly realized this remote access to corporate content increased productivity, but they had no idea whether the new remote systems were patched, what their security footprint was, or what applications were running – Microsoft Intune and Intune Suite provided that visibility.””

Even though the transition to remote work is complete for most organizations, Cyclotron hasn’t seen any drop off for its Cloud Endpoints practice. In fact, the Cloud Endpoints team has doubled in size over the past year and will need to grow by 50 percent in the coming year to address all the new client inquiries. “People are seeing the ROI [return on investment] and reduction of administrative overhead that cloud-based device management can deliver and now want to move away from hybrid infrastructures to a cloud-native approach,” said Winslow, and stressed that interest in Windows 365 and Microsoft Intune Suite is high. “Windows 365 can provide nearly immediate access to a fully functional, secure desktop and all the applications you need without worrying about a three-year churn cycle of having to buy everyone new high-performance laptops. Performance is now in the cloud,” continued Winslow. “We’ve also seen increasing requests for the advanced management features in Intune, such as management for macOS-based devices.”

Windows 365 and Intune help reduce costs, increase protection

One of the areas where Cyclotron has experienced the biggest call for cloud desktops is in the finance sector. For example, the team recently deployed 300 Windows 365 Cloud PCs for a financial services company based in Chicago, Illinois, to introduce cloud cost efficiencies while easily enabling secure access for employees who are onboarded as part of mergers or acquisitions. “We have seen a lot of growth in both finance and healthcare because these are complex environments where security is paramount,” said Winslow. “Because merger and acquisitions activity is frequent in these sectors, being able to use Intune to rapidly provision a cloud PC for new employees within minutes is huge. It ensures that workers can be productive from day one while IT has some breathing room to deal with migration of backend systems.”

Intune remains core to the Cloud Endpoints solution, and Cyclotron sees organizations leveraging it to implement device management on a larger scale. For example, the team is currently working with a large consumer goods manufacturer to deploy Intune to 15,000 Android devices across North America to ensure quality and compliance of in-store displays at mass retailers. The customer was using an expensive third-party mobile device management (MDM) solution that added complexity to the environment. With Microsoft 365 F3 licenses for frontline workers and Microsoft 365 E5 licenses already in place, moving to the Intune solution will not only provide an integrated system to help them simplify management and security of devices and applications in the field, but also save US$250,000 annually in license costs. “The client wanted a trusted partner that had experience in migrating away from third-party MDM solutions while also meeting the custom requirements of their environment – especially their change-management processes,” said Winslow. “Because we are very experienced in these migrations and able to take an agile, customer-centered approach, we were a great fit.”

Expanding Cloud Endpoints success

Much of the success that Cyclotron has experienced with Cloud Endpoints solutions is due to its best practices around change management, along with the solution deployment framework the team has developed to capture and communicate all project details from discovery to operationalization and beyond. “Whether it’s a change of MFA [multifactor authentication] for Intune, implementing Windows Hello for business, mobile device enrollment, or conditional access policies, we make sure that we provide customized training and education to the end user in advance of the change to ensure adoption success,” said Winslow. “At the same time, our solution deployment framework deliverable provides the business with a complete accounting of all the decision points throughout the project, plus recommendations and long-term considerations that they can use to further innovate.”

One of the key innovations that Cyclotron is helping customers to enable is Microsoft Copilot, offering a Copilot readiness assessment to help determine if environments are Copilot-ready. The assessment examines if you have the right controls for establishing AI guardrails and the visibility to understand what might be vulnerable or exposed to these processes. “We want to guide customers on the journey to Copilot and ensure they understand not only what scenarios would be best aided by generative AI, but also put the necessary controls and components in place to deliver optimal results for the business,” added Winslow.

"People are seeing the ROI [return on investment] and reduction of administrative overhead that cloud-based device management can deliver and now want to move away from hybrid infrastructures to a cloud-native approach."

—Scott Winslow, Identity and Devices Manager, Cyclotron

"Our solution deployment framework deliverable provides the business with a complete accounting of all the decision points throughout the project, plus recommendations and long-term considerations that they can use to further innovate."

—Scott Winslow, Identity and Devices Manager, Cyclotron

Cyclotron drives growth with Cloud Endpoints solutions