So I’ve been playing around a bit with Windows 365 Enterprise and thinking about “okay, what cool things should we try?”.
First step is of course to set it up and I thought about writing a guide about that. Halfway through my guide I realised that the one written by Christiaan Brinkhoff was far superior to mine, so go check his guide out!
One thing came to mind however, could you get CloudLaps to work on a Cloud PC?
Of course, we needed to try this even though I’m not a 100% sure that you need it.
What CloudLaps does it that it provides your PCs with a unique, randomized password for the local admin account on the machines which is rotated on a given interval (default is every 3 days). By using this functionality, all your PCs will have unique passwords for their local admin accounts meaning that if this is handed out to an end-user or support personal, the password will stop working when the password is updated.
The Cloud PC configuration
If you have not yet implemented CloudLaps, have a look at the guide in the link above, but if you have it in place, you are ready to go.
Since CloudLaps is built on proactive remediations in Microsoft Intune, you will need to make sure that the Cloud PCs are included in the assignment by using (or adding) a group containing all your Cloud PCs. Windows 365 Enterprise gives you the benefit that Cloud PCs are being automatically enrolled into Microsoft Intune which gives you the possibility to manage them directly without any further actions!
In this example, all the Cloud PCs are included in the same group as all other PCs since we want all these PCs to have the same settings. This was done by adding an extra rule to our Dynamic Group.
device.deviceModel -contains "Cloud PC Enterprise"
No additional configuration needed!
The outcome
The outcome of this test was as expected, worked perfectly fine!
A local admin password is populated in the CloudLaps portal, and I can use it on the machine to elevate my rights on the Cloud PC.
Since you can use the exact same configuration for Cloud PCs as physical PCs, you will not need to separate how you manage the Cloud PCs. They are just another PC, but in the cloud!
