(upbeat instrumental pop music)
- [David] DWP itself is the largest
government department.
It has around about 90,000 employees.
We look after actively 25 million citizens
and round about 200 billion pounds worth
of taxpayer's money flows through
the department every year.
- [James] where we were before,
we had quite old, heavy,
slow Windows 7 laptops
for our mobile users
and we started a small proof of concept,
probably about three years ago now,
to look at more modern, light, faster
Windows 10 based devices.
- The response we got from
our employees, our colleagues,
when we introduced the
Surface Pros was phenomenal.
It was an absolute step change
from where they were before.
- Speed of the devices,
the weight of the devices,
the flexibility the devices allowed them
to do their daily tasks.
And so that rapidly expanded,
we purchased a significant number
of what were Surface Pro
4s and then 5s and then 6s
over a number of years.
The move to cloud services
is less of a reliance
on expensive and hard to
maintain on premise hosting,
and the ability to scale really quickly.
- What I'm looking for is a device
that is truly, truly cloud native.
One which never comes
home, one which lives out
in the big, bad world, which
can be configured remotely,
which you take out the
box and it just works.
- Security within DWP is a key element
because we deal with customers' data
and we want to make sure
that data is secured,
not only when it's in transit,
but also when the data -
- [David] Cloud-first
allows us to really simplify
the build and deployment stages.
What autopilot allows us to do,
send it directly to that individual,
when that individual
takes it out of the box,
that machine builds.
And then it builds on the
individual's applications
on top of that,
so from opening it in the
box very, very quickly
over the air, anywhere that
machine knows what it is,
who it belongs to and
how it needs to build.
- They don't have to worry
about going to this device or that device,
they can just open it up really quickly,
look at the device with Windows hello,
log into that device and get
the softwares up and running
that they need for that day.
- Element of our ability to be successful
in such a short period of time
is our collaboration with Microsoft.
- One of the most impressive
things through this project
has been the relationship
between Microsoft and DWP.
They've worked fantastically together
and we've achieved a lot.