Divya Rawat, an intern with Microsoft India, worried that the Microsoft internship she had fought so hard for was going to be cancelled. So did Prakhar Mishra, another intern in Microsoft India’s summer class.
“I was quite concerned at first,” Rawat says. “Many of my friends were having their offers revoked.”
In India, COVID-19 quarantine restrictions not only required everyone to work from home, but they also blocked anyone from picking up a PC from an office or getting it shipped to their residence.
“How can you have an internship without a computer?” Mishra says. “I had my doubts on how my internship could possibly happen.”
Many people were involved, but Debashis Sahoo, an engineering group manager in Microsoft India, was on point to help Microsoft India’s 600 interns get the computers they needed to start their internships on time. The pressure was on—the internships lasted for only eight weeks and were about to start.
“Just when we were about to get started, a countrywide lockdown was announced in India,” Sahoo says. “Our internship program was commencing, and we were running out of options.”
Then Sahoo and team realized that Microsoft’s Digital might be able to help. A Microsoft Digital team was piloting a new virtual desktop solution that enabled a secure, remote work experience from any device, anywhere.
“Could that work for us?” Sahoo wondered. “Could virtual desktops allow our interns to work on their own assigned virtual machines, and do it securely?”
He did a quick deep dive into Windows Virtual Desktop and found out that Microsoft’s digital security team had been pilot testing it since January. He determined that combining Windows Virtual Desktop with Microsoft Azure’s virtual machine (VM) capability connected over secure Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute, a capability provided by the Enterprise 360 team in Microsoft Customer and Partner Experience (CPE), could save the day.
Four hustle-filled days later, 600 interns started on time.
“Amazingly, we did it as scheduled,” Sahoo says. “Their virtual experience was as rich and secure as if they were in the office.”
[Read about how employees securely work from home using a Zero Trust strategy. Learn how Microsoft enables its employees to work from anywhere. Read how Microsoft has transformed its VPN performance.]
Unpacking Windows Virtual Desktop
Long-time Microsoft experts on the topic will tell you virtual desktops have been around the company for a long time. What’s new is the Windows 10 multi-session capability available through Windows Virtual Desktop, which makes using virtual desktops much easier to use, scale, and secure.
“Windows Virtual Desktop allows you to create virtual desktops that work just like a physical Windows PC would,” says Mark Lawrence, a senior program manager on Microsoft’s digital security team. “That means the people who use one—new hires, interns, and so on—get access to the Windows Start menu, with Microsoft’s productivity applications, the Microsoft Edge browser, and everything else they would need to work at any location. No more waiting for a physical device delivery.”
They also get immediate access to the corporate resources they need to do their work, something especially important for interns who need to get off to a fast start. It used to be that interns arriving at Microsoft would be handed Windows PCs and then spend two or more hours setting them up, working through policies and updates one restart at a time.
When you use Windows Virtual Desktop’s multi-session capabilities, those delays go away.
Why?
Windows Virtual Desktop enables users to provision and manage many virtual machines in one multi-session. That allows the team to work through all those time-consuming updates before they issue individual virtual machines to the interns (or any group of users).
“That means they can be productive in just minutes,” Lawrence says. “All they need is their personal laptop (or any device, really), an internet connection, a web browser or a quick Remote Desktop Client install app, and they’re ready to go.”
Device management is also easier.
“The best part is they get all that capability and we don’t need to manage their physical device,” he says. “We wrap management into virtualization—that way we can trust their identity. We can make sure their Windows Virtual Desktop instances are compliant and protected.”
Saving internships is important, but the potential for how Microsoft can effectively use Windows Virtual Desktop goes far beyond that—software engineers tethered to heavy-duty PCs under their desks can switch to virtual desktops that let them take the compute power they need on the road, to coffee shops or couches (they can even access it on their phone when quick action is needed).
On the management side, Microsoft also benefits from Windows Virtual Desktop’s scalability and affordability—and its ability to host many users at once as a jump box, a feature called Windows 10 multi-session.
“This is a Windows 10 instance that allows multiple users to be concurrently logged in at once,” Lawrence says. “We can have up to 128 users at once—that’s where we get the super-great utilization per Windows Virtual Desktop VM delivery.”
Not only does that cut costs, but it also makes it easy and practical to put controls in place, which is really helpful when you have a bunch of engineers working together on one project in one jump box.
“The more engineers you can put in one box, the fewer virtual machines the team has to deploy and manage,” says Luis Quintana, a senior service engineering manager on Microsoft’s digital security team that piloted and deployed Windows Virtual Desktop.
The team quickly found out that you need to have the right number of Microsoft Azure virtual machine cores in place to support topflight engineering work.
Quintana says the Windows Virtual Desktop team has done a great job making virtual desktops easier and simpler to use.
“It’s been great to try this out,” he says. “We’ve been partnering directly with the Windows Virtual Desktop engineering team, and it’s been great to give them feedback, ask them questions, and influence improvements on a product that just launched. The partnership has been great—both teams have been working together towards really improving the user experience.”
Microsoft’s internal testing of Windows Virtual Desktop has quickly ramped up, going from 1,100 employees in January to 6,500 as of this writing. Lawrence, Quintana, and the team have pivoted their trial of Windows Virtual Desktop to focus on supporting the company as it works through having its employees work remotely, including interns working remotely in India.
Virtual internships nearly no different
On their first day, each intern was issued a locked-down Windows Virtual Desktop space that gave them access to Microsoft 365 productivity and collaborative tools like Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. They were also assigned a Microsoft Azure virtual machine, a secured workspace where they could securely enlist and contribute code for their assigned project using tools like Microsoft Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, among others.
Additionally, when interns needed help, they could reach out directly to an internal Microsoft Helpdesk that was briefed and given a guide for how to troubleshoot their virtual setups.
The interns needed to work on highly confidential projects, so Sahoo and the team needed to set up their VMs on one of four specially secured Microsoft Azure datacenters, the closest of which was in Singapore. When they determined that the datacenter had capacity for them, Sahoo and team used Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute to securely connect each intern’s VM to the Microsoft business group that they would be working with—the groups are scattered across the company, but all have a presence in India. Additionally, the team worked with security, Microsoft’s Global Helpdesk, and Microsoft Human Resource’s University Recruitment Team to make sure each intern’s virtual desktop and VM worked seamlessly.
“Six hundred virtual machines were created, secured, and customized to the needs of our internal business groups in advance,” Sahoo says. “These were then assigned to the interns by their respective managers as part of their onboarding workflow. We created virtual machines for them with highly performant SKUs (stock keeping units) and applied policies to meet our specifications for working on highly confidential projects, giving them access to the source code and resources they needed to contribute to their assigned projects.”
The manager of each intern guided them through setup, giving them their corporate credentials and helping them get logged in. “Most of our interns didn’t face any issues, but some had typical onboarding issues, mostly linked to their personal devices,” he says.
Mishra says he was able to get his computer configured in one session.
“It worked right away,” he says. “Two or three days later, I had an issue with my virtual machine, but it was easy to fix.”
Mishra worked on a DevOps engineering project that uses Microsoft Azure Data Bricks and Microsoft Power BI to use machine learning to automate manual incident management reporting processes.
“We’re learning how to solve real-world problems,” he says. “Our work is having real business impact—this is something really big for us.”
Rawat’s experience wasn’t as smooth because her older PC had seen better days.
“Honestly, I was having some issues with my laptop,” she says. “I was very intimidated—I thought it wouldn’t function very well with heavy software engineering.”
It ended up taking 45 minutes to get her virtual machine set up.
“My manager did help me a lot,” she says. “He guided me through each step over a Microsoft Teams call.”
When the installation was done, a black screen kept popping up. Rawat filed a ticket with the Microsoft Helpdesk. “I had a call with a technician, and they were able to fix it,” she says.
From that point on, she could sign into her virtual machine each day, do her work, access what she needed, and largely work normally.
“It looks like I have just another desktop on my machine,” Rawat says. “There’s no difference—it feels like a regular desktop.”
After initial onboarding and getting assigned a Microsoft Azure VM, it took her about two days to install all the developer tools and resources she needed to do her work. And—an important benchmark for any new software engineer—she could check in the code she was working on in Microsoft Azure DevOps within two weeks of her internship starting.
Rawat’s internship project was to equip live site engineers supporting the Microsoft Customer Service and Support team with telemetry for faster and satisfactory resolutions. When engineers get calls with a difficult-to-solve technical problem, they like to look through the logs that document how others solved that problem.
“The challenge is that looking at logs is very manual and time-consuming,” Rawat says. “I’m building an application that interacts with an API to fetch log files from Azure Blob Storage where those logs are stored—my application will display them in a rich, easy-to-use interface. My part was to build the application that surfaces those logs for the engineers.”
For Sahoo and team, allowing Rawat, Mishra, and the other interns to have their Microsoft experience was very rewarding.
Bigger picture, turning to Windows Virtual Desktop during what has been a tough time for everyone has shown Microsoft India, the security team in Microsoft Digital, Microsoft Azure, and many others the value of thinking creatively.
“What could have been a big disappointment for some talented interns turned instead into a great learning experience for them and for Microsoft,” Sahoo says. “We’ll incorporate what we learned into how we run the intern program going forward—it will help us a lot when things return to normal and working in the office is allowed again.”
- Learn more about Windows Virtual Desktop, how to deploy a virtual desktop or app, and how to use Azure ExpressRoute.
- Read about how employees securely work from home using a Zero Trust strategy.
- Learn how Microsoft enables its employees to work from anywhere.
- Read how Microsoft has transformed its VPN performance.
