Cognizant embraces remote work with Microsoft Intune and Windows Autopilot

Sanesh Vig, a program manager on the Microsoft Intune team, still remembers the late-night phone call he received in March 2020 from the head of the IT Transformation Office at Cognizant.

“Like most of the world, they were facing a tremendous challenge,” Vig said. “With travel restricted across the globe, the IT teams couldn’t get to the office to image and provision laptops for their suddenly remote workforce.”

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of Cognizant’s associates in India were stuck at home. Cognizant’s workforce traditionally worked out of the office and the company was predominantly reliant on desktop computers. With offices shut down, employees were challenged to get their jobs done.

Cognizant’s experience with Microsoft’s Autopilot and Intune helped them prepare for the worst

“We were locked down due to COVID within a month of March 2020,” said Ramesh Gopalakrishnan, Cognizant’s Director for Digital Workplace Services. “The pandemic forced us to quickly provision thousands of laptops and accelerate our plans to roll out Intune for all our endpoints.”

A global multinational corporation that provides customer information technology, digital consulting, and business process outsourcing services to Fortune 500 clients, Cognizant already was utilizing Microsoft Intune as a service to manage all its mobile devices. More than two-thirds of its 350,000 employees are based in India.

“Before we guide our clients’ modernization journeys, we’ve driven our own technology modernization. Cloud and automation are a big part of that transformation,” said Neal Ramasamy, Cognizant’s Chief Information Officer. “Tools like Microsoft Intune help power our globalization by enabling our IT teams to scale up their support quickly and by improving the associate experience around the world.”

When the pandemic hit, Cognizant had the tools it needed to deal with the worst-case scenario. With a process that does not require on-premises infrastructure, Autopilot can securely provision devices over an internet connection. Cognizant’s IT teams were quickly able to transition to remote provisioning and ensure that the company’s associates could productively work from home.

“Day 1 productivity was never the plan,” Gopalakrishnan said. “This was a big project that was supposed to be completed over a two-year period. Yet, within a week, we started delivering a successful Autopilot Intune migration. From then on, we delivered laptops from our suppliers directly to employees at home.”

Over the course of several months, Cognizant fully operationalized a Windows Autopilot deployment.

“Today, as we speak, we stand as one of the largest deployments of Autopilot in the world, having provisioned more than 250,000 devices remotely,” Gopalakrishnan said.

“We would like to thank Microsoft for the partnership,” Ramasamy added. “The technology allowed us to adapt quickly, and we’re happy to see our feedback helping Microsoft improve the solution.” 

Autopilot and Intune migration reduced IT workloads and improved employee experiences

Cognizant has become one of the largest enterprises in the world to empower all its employees to implement device setup remotely without any intervention from IT.

The benefits of Cognizant’s Autopilot and Intune deployment include reduced IT workloads and improved employee experience. This self-service strategy has reduced the reliance on IT support, and it has created a smooth onboarding process for new hires and device replacements.

“If you do an imaging in the office, it takes close to 45 minutes,” Gopalakrishnan said. “If you do it in Autopilot, it’s 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the Internet connection. You don’t need to deploy IT personnel to do the imaging on-site when an associate now can do it on their own. It saves a lot of time in terms of IT operations and the productivity of the associates.”

The deployment of Autopilot and Intune also reduces Cognizant’s carbon footprint, enables solutions for asset recovery and ensures data security.

“Autopilot and Intune make our lives easier,” Gopalakrishnan said. “Autopilot is a flexible solution and vital tool for our endpoint teams – without it, they would open laptops, image them, and stick-on shipping labels, day in and day out.”

In addition to reducing the time IT spends provisioning devices, the solution also helps new employees be productive on Day 1. While the self-service capability cuts costs, it also empowers employees to enroll themselves, which is pivotal for the onboarding process and employee retention.

“Once an employee’s ID is activated on the day they join, they can immediately log in and start the project,” said Rathinam Sundaramurthy, who manages endpoint engineering for Cognizant, working on both Autopilot and Intune-related services. “This is not possible without Autopilot.”

Mergers and acquisitions are also a big part of Cognizant’s business. In the past, it could take as long as 90 days for Cognizant to collect all the new associates’ machines, re-provision them, and complete the onboarding process. Now, with Autopilot, “We just do a reset and onboard them,” Gopalakrishnan said. “It’s seamless. Reset and reenroll; you’re done.”

“Intune is the way to go,” he said. “New companies that are getting started – there’s no reason to choose a data center Configuration Manager. Go cloud native. Go to Intune. That’s the easiest way to start for most organizations.

“You will be ahead of the curve in terms of technology, productivity, and customer-centricity. Day 1, you can make your employees productive wherever they live in the world.”