Nationwide Building Society achieves 27% savings in total cost of ownership with Windows 365

The world’s largest “mutual” building society, Nationwide Building Society boasts 18 million members in the United Kingdom who collectively share ownership and profits. The 140-year-old organization prioritizes personalized service for its member community, offering opportunities for home ownership and savings. Faced with an aging on-premises infrastructure, the organization sought a modern, cloud-enabled solution to meet these goals and drive the success of expanding operations. 

Saving infrastructure investment costs with Windows 365 Cloud PCs

Scaling up Nationwide’s datacenter by building a new virtual desktop infrastructure was not a cost-effective, sustainable solution due to long lead times and increasing IT management overhead. With the goal of avoiding these added costs, Nationwide looked to a cloud-enabled desktop experience. The organization found it in Windows 365 Cloud PCs—which stream a full Windows desktop, apps, settings, and content securely—automatically updated with Windows Autopatch. Using Microsoft Intune, Nationwide was able to complete the required manual patching of legacy applications with update rings.

Jonathan Murray, Technology for Colleagues Lead at Nationwide Building Society, says, “Nationwide wants to delight our customers, ensuring we take care of our 18 million members. We make sure that we work with offshore partners to achieve this goal and feel Windows 365 was the best solution to make that happen.”  

Modern, hybrid workplace for employees 

Nationwide selected a comprehensive solution across Windows 365, Windows 11 Enterprise, Intune, and Microsoft Entra ID. It used the solution to offer a modern, hybrid workplace for employees and could support development efforts that improve how the organization delivers financial products and services to customers. Nationwide used the pre-provisioning capabilities of Autopilot, eliminating the time-consuming process of reimaging devices onsite. The modern, inclusive user experience of Windows 11 Enterprise, along with its more secure, streamlined IT management capabilities, was critical in the organization’s decision to upgrade devices to the operating system.  

Nationwide deployed Microsoft 365, harnessing its built-in security and leveraging the Intune licenses included in Microsoft 365 for unified endpoint management capabilities. The organization used the centralized, cloud-based security controls of Intune to manage physical devices and cloud endpoints. Windows 365 adds the flexibility of spinning up a highly secure desktop experience anywhere. Employees can safely stream their own Windows experience—including personalized apps, content, and settings—from the Microsoft Cloud to any device.  

Mindful of elevating the member experience, Nationwide initially looked at cloud VDI solutions before selecting Windows 365 as an easy-to-deploy, cloud-based PC experience. “Windows 365 is cloud-based and achieves a 27% savings in the total cost of ownership for the organization,” says Andy Marsh, End User Services Product Owner at Nationwide Building Society. “On-premises environments are heavy to manage and time-intensive to patch. Windows 365 has lower overhead. It’s ready to go versus creating your own solution.” 

Nationwide benefited from a Microsoft Unified Support contract, through which it could respond quickly to challenges that arose during deployment. Murray notes that Microsoft delivered crucial support during and after the deployment, explaining, “Microsoft provided inputs to support us in the initial phase of aligning and delivering the solution—supporting the scale we needed to provision at, monitoring processes, and working with support teams on deployment issues.”  

The Windows 365 deployment was rolled out in phases, first internally, then to Nationwide’s offshore partners. It launched with an internal pilot group of 150 users. “We rolled out pilot groups, then scaled up after signing off testing of applications,” Murray recalls. “Windows 365 enables the agility of testing applications easier than VDI solutions by allowing testers to quickly spin up different install versions. Partners had devices running old and new installs to test functionality. After successful feedback, we rolled out profiles and pushed to more users.” Continues Murray, “Nationwide worked with partner account directors to ensure they were prioritizing migration efforts due to a short timeline to end of service life. We had a strong business case for scaling up usage, enabling broader use of partner resources, and consolidating deployments.” Nationwide currently has 2,700 Cloud PCs deployed, amounting to 12% of its user base. The organization is currently exploring strategies to further expand the deployment. 

Murray projects the organization-wide effort will continue to mid-2025: “We’re working between now and mid-2025 to ensure that all of our colleagues across the Windows 365 environment and our physical devices are migrated to Windows 11 Enterprise.” He sees the value in Windows 11 as empowering the Nationwide workforce with modern UX and accessibility features and the IT team with enhanced security and administration capabilities as the organization continues to develop modern management architecture. The default OS images ready to deploy with Windows 365 make this an easy process and help lead the way in Nationwide’s broader Windows 11 deployment to physical devices. 

Modern, more secure computing drives customer relations 

Nationwide now has the ability to rebuild devices without returning them to a Nationwide site. It benefits from Windows 365 security features, which include automated Windows 365 disaster recovery, multifactor authentication, user authentication of offshore colleagues to Cloud PCs, and Microsoft Entra ID, replacing the use of RSA keys.  

The benefits of Windows 365 and Microsoft Entra ID aligned with Nationwide’s priorities with highly secure management of the company’s data estate through endpoint management and security tools. “From a security perspective, we focused on validating authentication and verification with multifactor authentication (MFA),” says Murray. “We use native Microsoft security tooling, like Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, and building up our data loss prevention capability with the security tooling of Microsoft E5, alongside security perimeter controls like MFA.”  

Cost was an additional factor. Avoiding the capital expenditure of on-premises infrastructure moved Nationwide’s decision to secure a Windows 365 solution forward. Nationwide was able to move to an operating expense model of recurring monthly expenditure that limited the large capital expenditure it would have incurred by upgrading its former on-premises datacenter infrastructure. Besides cost efficiencies, the decreased time needed for provisioning has created a more efficient and favorable onboarding experience for employees.  

Murray affirms that the greater value to the organization is the broader relationship it enjoys with Microsoft. “From our perspective, Microsoft was the only game in town that could quickly mitigate our end-of-service-life risk while simultaneously helping us complete a transformation of our partner ecosystem,” he says. 

Nationwide is considering compelling future use cases for Windows 365, including more efficiently onboarding onshore employees. Murray states, “We’re looking at using Windows 365 to improve the third-party onboarding process for onshore colleagues—creating a simpler onboarding process where people don’t need to come onsite and can be mobilized to work with us right away.” The organization is also considering providing Microsoft Dev Box cloud-based developer workstations to onshore colleagues doing software development and is currently exploring further Windows 365 use cases. 

 With the perennial goal of working to improve customer experience, Nationwide is identifying new use cases for Windows 365 to be used with frontline workers in contact centers. The organization is now considering how Windows 365 can support what is currently the United Kingdom’s largest branch network of major financial institutions and build a Nationwide Branch of the Future.  

The biggest impact, and the reason behind Nationwide’s migration in the first place, points back to the organization’s membership. Marsh clearly visualizes why Nationwide tackled the datacenter migration in the first place: “Our primary driver is maximizing time and resources of customer and colleague journeys—creating efficiencies, communicating information, and connecting the right teams. The less time spent configuring infrastructure or figuring out the business side, the more we spend on customer experience. It’s one of our driving principles.” 

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