Yesterday’s keynote featured several customers, including luxury car manufacturer Aston Martin. The company is an example of the many enterprises that use the full range of Microsoft products and cloud platforms for IT success.
One key challenge for the IT team was to manage and secure global staffs’ laptops, mobile devices, and smart phones, as these employees rarely set foot into the offices. If their devices were running outdated virus signatures and software and they had no way to remotely wipe a device if it was stolen. Employees faced downtime if their laptops required servicing because all we could offer was a reactive support model and it could take days before an employee was back up and running.
“Our staff’s sole purpose is to provide advanced technology that enables Aston Martin to build the most beautiful, iconic sports cars in the world,” said Daniel Roach-Rooke, IT infrastructure manager, Aston Martin. “From corporate desktops and software development to private and public cloud, Microsoft is our IT vendor of choice.”
To ensure their global employees stay productive no matter where they are or what device they are using, they subscribed to Windows Intune to secure and manage their devices. When they were investigating Windows Intune they had just deployed Microsoft System Center 2012 SP1 to manage the corporate PCs. Daniel Roach-Rooke, IT Infrastructure Manager highlights “The 2012 refresh year demonstrated Microsoft’s commitment to building interoperable products that just work seamlessly together”. This set the stage for an integrated management solution. Windows Intune connects with System Center Configuration Manager to give them a single console to manage devices, whether they are on the network or not.
With the new management infrastructure in place Aston Martin get a central view into the health of employees’ remote mobile devices so the IT team can solve computing issues quickly. The solution also enhances their data security. The IT team can apply IT governance policies and best practices to remote devices and, because Windows Intune works with Active Directory, they can align remote users’ devices with existing security groups and wipe a phone remotely if it’s lost or stolen.
Windows Intune tracks and manages almost 700 employee-provided devices, including 180 Windows Phone 8 devices, which are managed using Configuration Manager, accommodating employees’ who want to use more of their own devices at work—while ensuring a reliable computing experience. The software portal in Windows Intune is vital to their users are able to self-service and get the applications and support they require.
Summarizing the success of the projects to date, Simon Callow highlighted ‘What I want to do with Azure, what I want to do with Office 365, what I want to do with Intune, is to enable the decision makers to make the decisions and to make them quickly , and make them with the right information in their pockets.’
Want more information? Be sure to read the case study and solution that Aston Martin implemented, and check out the video below:
Other Product Highlights – Windows Intune
This week at TechEd, we’re sharing our excitement about the upcoming releases of Windows Server 2012 R2, System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager, and Windows Intune. Let us summarize how the announcements we’re making can help you embrace consumerization while supporting the management needs of IT.
By itself, System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager can:
- Deploy and manage Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2
- Provision certificates, Wi-Fi and VPN profiles
- Deploy links to web applications
- Provide role-based access to reports
When used in conjunction with the next release of Windows Intune, organizations can benefit from greater depth in device management in several areas, including:
- Giving people a consistent experience in discovering and installing corporate applications that IT has made available to them, across all of their managed devices
- Publishing corporate apps and services across device types, regardless of whether they’re corporate-connected or cloud-based
- Granting more granular control over device settings available to configure Windows, Windows RT, Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android devices to make them compliant with corporate policies
- Wiping corporate applications, data, and policies from devices selectively when they are no longer managed by the organization
SQL Server 2014
SQL Server is another core product in many of the solutions our customers implement. Yesterday we announced the next version of the data platform – SQL Server 2014. Designed and developed with our cloud-first principles in mind, it delivers built-in in-memory capabilities, new hybrid cloud scenarios and enables even faster data insights. Be sure and read all about it in the Data Platform Insider blog post from Quentin Clark. And be sure to get more detail in this morning’s post on the Data Platform Insider blog.
Windows Server 2012 R2
Over the past 15 months, we’ve delivered 3 waves of industry leading datacenter innovations with System Center 2012, Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012 SP1. With these three releases, we have established a solid foundation for our enterprise and service provider customers to cloud-optimize their business. This week at TechEd, we announced a refresh of our key private and hybrid cloud solutions with Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2, as well as new offerings including the Windows Azure Pack (formerly known as Windows Azure Services for Windows Server), Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager and Windows Azure Backup.
Get more detail from this mornings Windows Server blog and their "Hybrid Cloud Computing with Windows Server and System Center" article.
If you haven't had a chance to read it yet, be sure to read Brad Anderson's Blog post, "TechEd 2013: After Today, Cloud Computing is No Longer a Spectator Sport". We hope you enjoyed his keynote yesterday and don't forget on-demand viewing is available for the sessions you missed.
Look for our post tomorrow on TechEd North America 2013 Day 3 Highlights. Enjoy!