Commitment to modern endpoint management gives Pact Group security, flexibility for hybrid work

The need for a highly secure hybrid environment

Pact Group’s dedication to versatility is evident in its lean IT team of 65 to serve the company’s 6,000 employees. Its service desk, based in the Philippines, uses an offshore/onshore model that relies on both full-time staff and contractors. IT staff are responsible for supporting and securing daily operations.

Pact Group maintains a modern workplace underpinned by Microsoft 365. It uses tools like Power BI for extracting business intelligence from product tracking and tracing along with Microsoft Security services like Microsoft Sentinel for security information and event management. “Everything must work together to extract business intelligence and support collaboration and security,” says Guy Rosvall, General Manager of Infrastructure and Services at Pact Group. “We’re a cloud-first organization, and we use the Microsoft cloud as our datacenter and its services to run our business. Centering our strategy on Microsoft has driven a very low total cost of ownership, and the standardization and performance have helped us keep employee satisfaction high and provide modern, commercial-grade solutions to our customers.”

Thanks to this IT philosophy, Pact Group employees whose roles allowed it easily shifted to remote work while maintaining security and control. “We already had the tools to support remote work, so when COVID-19 hit, every Pact Group employee could leave our work sites and retain their normal level of IT access,” says Rosvall. “The transition was seamless. We already had Skype for Business implemented—we just moved forward with our Microsoft Teams rollout, which provided additional functionality and usability.”

A device management solution for a hybrid environment

For its newly remote workforce, Pact Group chose Microsoft Managed Desktop to provide update management and security monitoring and response; as of October 2021, 50 percent of employees use the service, and Pact Group plans to deploy it enterprise-wide. To underpin Microsoft Managed Desktop, Pact Group uses Microsoft Endpoint Manager to coordinate and monitor its physical and virtual endpoints from a single pane of glass. It also uses Windows Autopilot to simplify and automate device deployment, and it uses Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to help prevent, detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats. Leroy D’Souza, former Computing Architect at Pact Group, considers this solution a natural progression from the company’s existing Intune and Azure Resource Manager deployments. He says, “The real modernization came when we introduced a hybrid scenario with Endpoint Manager, Microsoft Managed Desktop, and Azure Active Directory, which we used to move to device risk–based Conditional Access.”

D’Souza sees the move to Microsoft Managed Desktop and Endpoint Manager as supporting a uniform, stable environment. “We use Endpoint Manager to deliver settings like single sign-on, Conditional Access, and multifactor authentication, which helps us deploy devices at the right performance and configuration baseline.”

Rosvall considers the addition of Microsoft Managed Desktop a key part of Pact Group’s commitment to security. “We’ve built our security suite 100 percent from Microsoft,” he says. “We buy Microsoft 365 E5 to make sure that every single device is as secure as possible. Even our Microsoft 365 F3 devices have a Microsoft Defender component attached to them.”

Continual improvements to IT operations, management, security, and employee experience

Because of regional restrictions, the company continues to use an internally developed Pact Group standard operating environment (SOE) in some countries. D’Souza says, “Previously, we distributed images using USB drives. With Endpoint Manager and Windows Autopilot, we save time by deploying PCs without having to constantly update our standard image. And I can use a standard Windows 10 image from a Microsoft Surface laptop or Dell device as a base, which saves me time building an image from scratch.” 

Pact Group considers its ongoing Microsoft investments an investment in its IT environment, and the company adopts new Microsoft products and services as soon as they’re released. Rosvall says, “Choosing Microsoft Managed Desktop and Endpoint Manager was a strategic move, not a cost-saving exercise. We adopted these products and services early to ensure that our Windows images were as safe and secure as possible without worrying about the ramifications of each configuration setting. Instead, we rely on Microsoft’s experience from monitoring millions of devices—that gives us a head start in our maturity without having to go through all the pain of learning it on our own.”

Pact Group has minimized compatibility and performance issues, increasing its Net Promoter Score (NPS). Rosvall says, “Our average help desk calls per user per month has dropped to below one. Our NPS for user experience is almost 80 now—it had averaged around 65. And our employees are extremely happy because they use web-based applications that are always up, and their devices have 99.9 percent uptime. By removing complexity around our systems and being in the cloud, everything just works. I can’t remember the last time our Azure environment was down.”

Efficiencies from a simplified, highly secure, cloud-first environment

The company’s use of Microsoft technologies to improve flexibility, security, and control has had a positive impact on its overall efficiency—and its bottom line. Rosvall says, ”Our IT spend is less than the industry standard. We’re this cost-effective thanks to our policy of simplifying our environment and using Microsoft products so that employees experience seamless, integrated updates.”

Pact Group handles security and productivity in a hybrid environment with minimal friction while empowering IT staff to focus on more creative pursuits, like Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 projects. The company engaged an experience management company and a penetration testing company to measure the impact of the Microsoft Managed Desktop image and the Pact Group SOE. The results showed that the Microsoft Managed Desktop devices did better on performance metrics like boot time and uptime. Rosvall says, “We use mainly Microsoft products to help make sure that our systems holistically interconnect. And when it comes to security and penetration testing, the company we hired for that said the Microsoft Managed Desktop image is one of the hardest for them to crack.”