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

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?

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

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

Thisenables an IT department to configure/customize images with little to noinfrastructure to manage and a process that is easy and simple. From the user'sperspective, it only takes a few simple steps to get Surface to a productivestate. In fact, the only interaction required from the end user is to connectto a network and to verify their credentials. Everything after that is fullyautomated.

Windows Autopilot allows you to:

• Automaticallyjoin devices to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD)
• Auto-enrolldevices into MDM services, such as Microsoft Intune (requires an Azure ADPremium subscription)
• Restrictthe Administrator account creation. Autopilot is the only way to have the firstperson who logs into Windows enter as a standard user
• Createand auto-assign devices to configuration groups based on device profiles
• CustomizeOOBE (Out of Box Experience) content and branding to meet organizationalrequirements
• Enablefull device configuration with Intune
• Resetor restart devices remotely

The true value of CDW Zero Touch services and Surface

Autopilotis the cornerstone of Microsoft 365 Modern Manageability. That said, Autopilotis simply a gateway to the powerful feature sets of Intune (with the ability tomanage device policy, applications and settings) and Azure Active Directory(providing identity services to unlock access to an individual's applicationsand 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 CDWZero Touch services, please contact your CDW account manager or visit cdw.ca/surface.