x15ventures powers, updates, and optimizes desktop environment with Microsoft Managed Desktop

Starting from scratch on a flexible and frictionless development environment

x15 was founded to bring the next generation of digital solutions to life, benefiting Commonwealth Bank’s 15 million customers and beyond. It supports experienced entrepreneurs building brands from the ground up by providing guidance and access to the customer base and distribution networks of Australia's leading bank, backed up by dedicated, top-of-the-line development tools, and IT support.

As a cloud-native business, the venture-scaler had near-infinite possibilities for where to take its infrastructure. It decided to build an entirely new operating environment and commit to modern management. “To drive the best innovation, we wanted to achieve a completely frictionless environment for our engineers and our product people to build on and produce their best work,” says Kelvin Lim, Chief Technology Officer at x15ventures.

Using Microsoft Managed Desktop for end-to-end device management and security monitoring with Microsoft 365, Windows 11, Microsoft Endpoint Manager, and other Microsoft resources, x15 has achieved its modern management ambitions with minimal effort. This has enabled x15 to move quickly and stay agile as it supports multiple ventures and delivers the services it promised to each venture company, while also taking advantage of the power of the cloud. With an environment managed and updated by experts from the Microsoft security operations team, the team at x15 and its ventures can focus on what they do best.

“As a startup and a greenfields IT environment, we were resource constrained when we got going,” says Lim. “At launch, we needed to secure our venture workplaces without distracting them from building great products, and found Microsoft had the best people in place to build, deploy, and manage our endpoints.”

Delivering the exact experience engineers want

x15’s internal IT team uses Microsoft Managed Desktop for its Windows desktop devices as part of its modern workplace management strategy, both from an information worker and developer perspective. The company prides itself on giving venture engineers the exact development experience they want, and with Microsoft Managed Desktop it offers curated user profiles with varying permissions. A standard profile for information workers is designed to help secure access to sensitive data, while a power user profile provides a persistent local administrator account to facilitate an application development experience native to Microsoft Managed Desktop.

“Typically, the standard operating environment can be so restrictive that it makes it very hard for engineers to get their job done, and we want to give all our engineers a more seamless experience,” says David Fleischmann, Head of Workplace, Infrastructure, and Operations at x15ventures. “They can focus on what they do, which is building and growing the next generation of digital solutions, and we can provide them with all the tools to do just that.”

Microsoft responds to security alerts in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint on x15’s behalf to reduce alert fatigue and remediate any concerns with its Microsoft Managed Desktop devices without intervention, easing the day-to-day management responsibilities for its Security Operations Centre. Having the underlying security components for its devices correctly configured, managed, and maintained remains key to having a more secure, up to date, and high-performing device environment.

“We’re trying to drive configuration as code, but we also get Microsoft tooling to strengthen our security, and that’s all managed by a tech giant that is ‘best in breed,’” says Lim. “We use processes and products that are already baked-in, so all we need to do is apply our configuration in a way that makes it secure, and then we can easily scale and provide governance in an automated way over the environment with Microsoft Managed Desktop.”

That scalability manifests itself in multiple ways, including the number of venture companies x15 can take on—it’s well on its way toward its goal of launching more than 25 businesses by 2024—and the size of its workforce. “When we started, we had about 60 people, and within two years we’ve grown to about 260,” says Lim. “We’ve managed to scale greatly in every dimension and work on getting the right people in to manage our process, take this forward, and double our numbers without a whole lot of other work.”

Embracing modern management for better visibility, improved onboarding, and easy device provisioning

In its journey with modern management, x15 has greatly benefited from freeing up employee capacity for more business-critical tasks. “With Microsoft Managed Desktop providing those new components and security configurations and, more importantly, maintaining them over time, it means people inside x15 can spend more of their day working on projects that are more important to their ventures and partners, compared to deploying Windows updates,” says Fleischmann.

Consistently working within the Microsoft family of products and services, x15 maintains a comprehensive view of its estates across every environment and device, giving it the ability to create detailed reports and scale without dedicating as many employees to the task. Adds Fleischmann, “We use Azure Active Directory for cloud-based identity, so it made sense that we keep this integrated view of identity across various Microsoft services and offerings, including Microsoft Surface and Windows 10, which we’re working on upgrading to Windows 11.” In addition to Surface, Lenovo, and HP devices all running Windows operating systems, x15 also has a large fleet of Apple MacBook devices, which it manages and reports on through Microsoft Endpoint Manager. This provides x15 with a consolidated view across all of the device types in the organization.

As x15 continues to grow and hire new employees, it can send anyone a Windows device to get them up and running at home. The x15 IT team can provision and deploy the device with Windows Autopilot and remotely load all the software, applications, and access that the employee needs. “Using Microsoft Managed Desktop in conjunction with Windows Autopilot, people can get automatically onboarded to x15’s workplace environment with all the correct tooling,” says Fleischmann.

Using Microsoft Managed Desktop has helped x15 scale effortlessly during the challenges of the last few years, including extended lockdowns and periods of remote working triggered by the pandemic, as well as a global shortage on hardware. “We want to offer enticing engineering opportunities for our developers, so there is always that freedom for people to go and do things in a bank-like context, but without the restrictions that have historically been associated with a corporate banking entity,” says Fleischmann.

Creating a future centered on augmented capabilities and accelerated growth

In a short amount of time, x15 has fully equipped its enterprise workplace with a range of easily managed, interoperating Microsoft solutions that bring new performance benefits and security improvements, including visibility into areas of the business that it lacked access to before. “Microsoft Managed Desktop effectively augments our team’s capability by providing the high-value tasks and the business as usual (BAU) run function without us having to invest in it,” says Fleischmann.

x15’s venture companies, engineers, and technologists can now focus on what they do day-to-day to bring value to the company, rather than worry about updating their workplace or determining capacity for a process they want to run. Those functions can be outsourced to Microsoft, or they can take advantage of the many tools that are now in place. This has all led to astounding growth that will only continue to feed back into both x15 and its venture companies’ success.

“We’ve just passed our second birthday, and we’re already in scaling mode,” says Lim. “We’ll never be done, but I meant it when I said I think we’re going to double our fleet in the near future. That means we can rapidly move on our strategy by onboarding a workforce in very short order, getting up to 200 laptops out, and giving our people access to an environment to start building and proving our hypotheses, which we would otherwise be sharpening on paper for a long time."

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