There are plenty of third-party solutions for running a Windows desktop in the cloud, but until now, Microsoft itself seemed hesitant to offer the same kind of user experience. Today, however, the company announced Windows Virtual Desktop, a new Azure-based service that provides a full virtualized multi-user Windows 10 experience, together with Office 365 ProPlus, on Azure .
The details here are still a bit sparse and Microsoft refused to provide any addition information ahead of the announcement. We will update this post once we hear more, though.
What Microsoft did say, however, is that the service will also include free Windows 7 Extended Security Updates. Why it’s throwing this in here with a virtualized Windows 10 desktop isn’t quite clear to me, but it is what it is.
Microsoft also says that deploying and scaling Windows on Azure with Office will only take a few minutes and that the desktops will feature all the built-in security and compliance features that its users would expect.
