Windows 365 lifts business to cloud

Employees will be right at home with Windows 365 because it looks and behaves like a regular Windows PC.

Windows 365.

Once upon a time computers needed hardware. Now they can exist as bits of software in the cloud.

I have been trialling a Microsoft Windows 365 computer that is cloud based. The screens that this cloud computer generates on my home monitor look the same as those on any ordinary Windows 10 computer, but this is a virtual desktop.

You open a browser window, point it to windows365.microsoft.com, login and you have your cloud computer available from any internet connected on Planet Earth. You can install the Windows Remote Desktop app and get a better experience than a browser offers with Windows 365, including multiple screen support.

You might ask: why operate a Windows computer in the cloud when you use a physical computer to access it? Why not use your computer’s Windows system? You wouldn‘t be Robinson Crusoe to ask that.

This isn’t about offering home users a cloud computing alternative. Microsoft is targeting business and enterprise with a system that lets them quickly allocate work applications to staff working at home or in the field, or casual staff. Businesses equally can revoke access when no longer needed.

The system is scalable. Businesses can pay to use, say, 50 cloud computers for a month and dump them if they wish.

Microsoft Windows 365 screenshot

You might say there are already plenty of virtual desktop services. Microsoft itself offers Azure Virtual Desktop and there is Amazon Web Services. True. The difference with most is that IT departments don’t have to get a virtual computer and install Windows systems, Windows 365 is a Windows system and it is good to go. Currently it offers Windows 10; Windows 11 is around the corner.

Employees will be right at home with Windows 365 because it looks and behaves like a regular Windows PC.

There are some surprises. One is the speed of uploads and downloads. I used the speedtest.net website on my test cloud machine and it registered 3213 megabits per second (or 3.2 gigabits per second) download speed and 1804 Mbps upload speed. This looks phenomenal.

In practice speeds won’t be that hot due to limitations of other sites you visit. I downloaded a 3.4GB movie file from a Google Drive directory to my Windows 365 cloud computer and it took 1 minute 10 seconds with speeds peaking above 50 megabits per second. That’s still impressive but not 3213 Mbps.

These download speeds are independent of the speed of your NBN connection. They are a measure of files transferring from somewhere on the internet to Microsoft’s cloud which will mostly be via fast fibre connections. You are viewing this from across the internet as an onlooker.

Windows 365 download & upload speeds

If the bulk of your work is accessing websites and online applications through the browser, and file transfers, Windows 365 will do the job.

I did hit a snag due to speed. My interaction with social media such as Facebook and Twitter was so fast that these social networks thought I was a bot trying to breach their system security and denied me access, until I established I was human.

Windows 365 can be too fast for some services

While download and upload speeds are fast, the processor speeds of your cloud computer will depend on how many “virtual CPU’s” it has. The more you pay, the faster the machine, and the more memory and storage it has.

The processing speed of my entry level Windows system wasn’t stellar. The benchmark Cinebench rated it as equivalent to an Intel Xeon Platinum 8272CL CPU with 1 core and 2 threads running at 2.60 GHz – 168cb. In broad brush terms, that’s Intel Core i5 territory. Cinebench R15’s graphics test wouldn’t run on the system.

While it’s fine for word processing and spreadsheets, I wouldn’t run anything processor intensive with these specs. You can pay extra for more powerful virtual desktops, extra memory and storage.

You do get access to Microsoft 365 programs such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and you can install applications the traditional way or via the Microsoft Store. These virtual desktops should be perfect for team collaboration through this software.

I enjoyed a Microsoft Teams video chat through my cloud based computer. This can be a little complicated because you need to forward your local audio and video to the cloud computer.

Audio was no problem but using my camera was problematic. I got the camera to work when I accessed the computer through Windows Remote Desktop, but it was a second or so behind the current action.

Windows 365 in the cloud. It looks like regular Windows on your PC.

There are two subscription options, Windows 365 Business and Windows 365 Enterprise.

A basic business plan offering light productivity use is $34.30 per user per month. You pay up to $278 per user per month for a machine capable of high-performance workloads.

Enterprise options are similarly priced but offer other features such as the Microsoft Endpoint management platform.

While Windows 365 offers a quality, a familiar Window experience out of the box, and the flexibility to upscale and downscale at will, this will be a lot of brass for many companies. They may prefer to buy a fleet of laptops or Chromebooks and be done with it.

Home users and small users needing just a few virtual PCs can buy NAS (Network Attached Storage) boxes by Synology and Qnap. NAS boxes are so versatile, offering network-wide file storage, cloud, backups, website hosting, private email and they manage photos and videos through smartphone apps. Virtual desktops are another use. I can’t recommend having a NAS box more.

But if you want to quickly scale up and down your workplace computer arsenal, and would prefer a system that instantly offers Windows with vastly reduced set-up complexity, Windows 365 might be for you.