Why You Should Use CDW Zero Touch Services to Manage IT Assets

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CDW and Microsoft Surface are excited to offer Zero Touch services to our customers. In today’s modern workplace, the ability to quickly get co-workers up and running has never been more important. CDW and Microsoft Surface offer a deployment solution that ships devices directly to your new employee without your IT department touching the device or even opening the box. Help your business procure, image, configure, manage, install and dispose of IT assets through an Autopilot refresh schedule. CDW is ready to help you leverage this opportunity, with the Microsoft Surface expertise you need, wherever you happen to need it.

What is Windows Autopilot?

Windows Autopilot is a cloud-based deployment technology in Windows 10. You can use Windows Autopilot to remotely deploy and configure devices in a zero-touch process right out of the box.

Traditionally, IT pros spend a lot of time building and customizing images that will later be deployed to devices that already come with a perfectly good OS already installed on them. Windows Autopilot introduces a new zero-touch deployment approach using a collection of technologies to set up and configure Windows devices.

This enables an IT department to configure/customize images with little to no infrastructure to manage and a process that is easy and simple. From the user’s perspective, it only takes a few simple steps to get Surface to a productive state. In fact, the only interaction required from the end user is to connect to a network and to verify their credentials. Everything after that is fully automated.

Windows Autopilot allows you to:

  • Automatically join devices to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
  • Auto-enroll devices into MDM services, such as Microsoft Intune (requires an Azure AD Premium subscription)
  • Restrict the Administrator account creation. Autopilot is the only way to have the first person who logs into Windows enter as a standard user
  • Create and auto-assign devices to configuration groups based on device profiles
  • Customize OOBE (Out of Box Experience) content and branding to meet organizational requirements
  • Enable full device configuration with Intune
  • Reset or restart devices remotely

The true value of CDW Zero Touch services and Surface

Autopilot is the cornerstone of Microsoft 365 Modern Manageability. That said, Autopilot is simply a gateway to the powerful feature sets of Intune (with the ability to manage device policy, applications and settings) and Azure Active Directory (providing identity services to unlock access to an individual’s applications and data). 

A very cool new feature to Autopilot is device self-deploying mode, which allows the device to be fully deployed – IT only needs to place the device on the network.  No sign-in is needed. The device will fully self-deploy applications, policies and settings. This is very useful for kiosk and IoT deployments where the installer simply needs to attach the device to the network and Autopilot/Intune takes care of everything from there, even launching the kiosk-based app, locking it into an appliance mode.

To learn more about Windows Autopilot and CDW Zero Touch services, please contact your CDW account manager or visit cdw.ca/surface.