Still shipping laptops to new hires?

Azure Virtual Desktop gives your team a full Windows desktop they can reach from any device, anywhere. No courier costs, no imaging queue, no chasing hardware back from leavers.

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Designed and deployed by a senior architect with over 2,000 AVD users in production.

What shipping hardware actually costs you

The timing is bad for a hardware refresh. Device prices have climbed sharply through 2026 on the back of a memory chip shortage, and official Windows 10 support ended on October 14, 2025, leaving a lot of otherwise healthy machines that cannot meet Windows 11's requirements. Extended Security Updates (ESUs) are still available, but they are charged per device and get more expensive every year. Plenty of companies are facing a large replacement bill for hardware that still works.

Every hire starts with a purchase order

A new starter cannot work until a machine is bought, imaged, and delivered. Procurement lead times, courier delays, and customs paperwork for hires outside Germany turn a start date into a moving target.

Your data walks out the door every evening

Company information sits on physical devices spread across homes, cafes, and airports. When one goes missing, your exposure depends on whether it ever reconnects long enough to be wiped.

Offboarding is a recovery operation

Someone leaves and now you are chasing a laptop through a courier, or writing it off. Multiply that across normal staff turnover and it becomes a permanent line item.

Your team's computers, running in Azure

A virtual desktop is a full Windows desktop that runs in Microsoft's data centres instead of on a machine in someone's bag. Your team signs in from whatever device they already have, a laptop, a home PC, a thin client, even a tablet, and they see the same desktop, the same applications, and the same files every time.

Nothing is stored on the device itself. The device becomes a window, not a vault. That single change is what removes the shipping, the imaging, the recovery, and most of the security exposure at the same time.

Microsoft calls this Azure Virtual Desktop. It is a mature, enterprise-grade platform, not an experiment, and it is what large distributed organizations have quietly been running on for years.

Virtual desktops compared to shipping laptops

An honest comparison, including the places where laptops still win.

	Azure Virtual Desktop	Shipping laptops
New starter productive on day one	✓	✗
No hardware purchase per employee	✓	✗
No shipping, courier, or customs costs	✓	✗
Company data never stored on the device	✓	✗
Lost device means no data exposure	✓	✗
Offboarding is disabling an account	✓	✗
Patch and update once, for everyone	✓	✗
Contractors work from their own machine	✓	✗
Scale headcount up or down on demand	✓	✗
Upgrade performance without new hardware	✓	✗
Consistent environment for every user	✓	✗
Works with no internet connection	✗	✓
Fixed, predictable cost with no tuning	✗	✓
Minimal setup before day one	✗	✓

The last three rows matter. Virtual desktops need a reliable connection, they are billed on consumption rather than a fixed price, and they need proper design up front. All three are manageable, and the discovery call is where we work out whether the trade is worth it for your situation.

See how AVD compares to Citrix, WorkSpaces, Horizon, and more →

Your AVD project, step by step

Every AVD project follows the same six steps. Timings are for an average deployment of 50 to 100 users and assume timely access, feedback and sign-off from your side. Larger environments take longer.

Booked within a few days

Fit Check

A short call to understand your setup, your users and your goals. I'll tell you honestly whether AVD makes sense for you and what a project would involve.

Up to 1 week

Discovery & Project Plan

A paid discovery based on your actual environment, quoted as a set number of hours after our first call. You receive a clear project plan with the design, the rollout approach and a fixed price for the implementation. A plan built on your real setup is what keeps the build on budget. Whether to go ahead afterwards is entirely your call.

3 to 4 weeks

Implementation

Once you approve the plan, or we adjust it together, I build your environment to the agreed design at the agreed price.

Secure sign-in and access for your users
Desktops and applications set up to the plan
Connection to your existing network and data
Regular progress updates, so there are no surprises

1 to 2 weeks

Pilot & Documentation

A pilot group uses the environment for real work and confirms it behaves as expected. Step-by-step user guides, network diagrams and other documentation are written, tested and reviewed so they are complete before go-live.

Up to 2 weeks of hyper-care

Cutover & Hyper-care

All users move over and the environment goes fully live. For the first weeks after, I'm on hand with a faster than usual response to fix anything the pilot missed. Longer on request.

A few days

Project Completion

Everything is handed over and signed off, closing the project and the hyper-care period.

Implementation is fixed-price. If something significant turns up during the build that was not found in discovery or disclosed beforehand, I'll send a short document explaining what it is, why it matters and the estimated extra cost, for your approval before continuing.

Ongoing support and maintenance are available after the project if you'd like them.

frequently asked questions

Is this more expensive than buying laptops?

It depends on how you currently buy and replace hardware. Virtual desktops shift spend from a capital purchase every three to four years to a monthly running cost, and that running cost is highly sensitive to how well the environment is designed. A badly configured AVD environment is expensive. A properly autoscaled one usually is not. Cost modelling against your actual numbers is part of every engagement.

Do we need to buy new devices?

No. That is the point. Existing laptops, home PCs, and thin clients all work. Many organizations extend the life of hardware they already own rather than replacing it.

What happens if someone's internet goes down?

They cannot reach their desktop, in the same way they could not reach email or any cloud application. For teams where offline work is routine, this is a genuine constraint and worth raising on the call.

Is performance good enough for real work?

For office applications, development work, and most line-of-business software, yes. Session hosts can be sized for the workload and resized later, which is something a purchased laptop cannot do. Graphics-intensive and latency-sensitive workloads need specific design and are assessed individually.

Do we already have the licenses?

Often yes. Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Premium, and several Windows licenses include AVD access rights. You pay for the Azure compute and storage. Licensing is checked during discovery so there are no surprises.

Can this run alongside our existing setup?

Yes. Most rollouts start with one team or one use case, prove the model, and expand from there. There is no requirement to move everyone at once.

Who manages it after you leave?

Your team, if that is what you want. Handover includes documentation and a knowledge transfer session, and Nerdio Manager is chosen specifically because it keeps day-to-day management approachable for a small internal team. If you would rather have ongoing support in place, that can be arranged separately.

get in touch

Have a project to discuss or a question about whether Tech Casters is the right fit? Send a message and I'll get back to you promptly.