The world’s largest toy company is one built on blocks, color, and imagination—and now it’s building a company cloud infrastructure that makes it easier for any kind of user to access from anywhere. The LEGO Group was founded in 1932 in Billund, Denmark, and is still headed by the same family. Its name derives from the Danish words leg godt, meaning “play well.” The company pledges to constantly innovate, never compromise, build, rebuild, and strive for the best. Lead Engineer Philip Schambye recently discussed how the LEGO Group’s experience on Windows 365 Cloud PC is helping them live up to those promises.
A Platform for All Kinds of Users
That’s what Windows 365 Cloud PC is designed to do. Announced last year at Microsoft’s Inspire conference, it’s a cloud service offering of Windows 10 and Windows 11 as a virtual machine. All of the apps, data, and settings of those operating systems can be accessed through the cloud from anywhere. Basically, it makes all of its users into instant superheroes. That’s why it was such a good fit for LEGO.
Consolidation of Solutions
Before rolling out the Windows 365 Cloud PC deployment, the LEGO Group had previously been using Microsoft Endpoint Manager (MEM) to protect its endpoints over widespread locations. The move to Cloud PC allowed for a consolidation of security benefits, since it comes with Microsoft Defender and is designed around MEM for enterprise use. (Windows 365 Business customers can configure Microsoft Endpoint Manager with the premium account.)
Another great addition included in the offering was Microsoft Teams, which Schambye said has really facilitated communications for LEGO Group members and their partners. Teams is always being upgraded and improved, and those enhancements can be appreciated in the Cloud PC setting too.
The Azure AD join feature of Windows 365 has also simplified the onboarding of devices for LEGO. They were able to keep their prior MEM policies and groups that are currently used for hybrid joined devices, and use the exact same policies to manage all of their Azure AD joined Cloud PCs.
The Importance of User Experience
Schambye said that the value for users and colleagues is very important to LEGO. Every time they try something new in their digital environment, they do a proof of concept and get feedback before scaling up. To try out Windows 365 Cloud PC, they tested with a limited number of licenses for a variety of user types. They got very good feedback, with users commenting that it was much quicker to spin up than the virtual desktops they had been using before.
In order to deploy this setup, Schambye recommends making sure your network is optimized and bandwidth monitoring is in place. Being such a large-scale, global company, they did need to mitigate some network issues in order to support the capacity of what they ultimately wanted to run. Once that was taken care of, the boost in performance with Cloud PC really stood out.
LEGO Group’s Experience on Windows 365 Cloud PC: One of Many
The LEGO Group’s experience on Windows 365 Cloud PC is one example of a company using this fairly new virtual machine option with great success. The interview with Philip Schambye was the first in a new “Windows in the Cloud” podcast series, hosted by Christiaan Brinkhoff. If you want to stay up to date with possibilities in Cloud PC, check out the podcast homepage to see past episodes, mark upcoming discussions, and even suggest ideas for future topics. And, as both Schambye and Brinkhoff would fully endorse, feel free to build some LEGO creations while you listen to great cloud talks.
A LEGO chess set that my kids and I built 🙂