With support for Windows 10 ceasing after October 2025, organisations will eventually need to install Windows 11 on their corporate devices. The good news is, this upgrade creates significant benefits for secure hybrid working.

While hybrid working has revolutionised how modern businesses operate, poorly supported remote devices represent a major risk to your cyber security.

Therefore, if employee assets are being used outside of the protection of your company servers, it is imperative that they are all accounted for and protected - or the possibility of a data breach is only a matter of time.

Forrester recently conducted a survey with a sample of 312 IT and security decision-makers at companies with 500 or more employees – and in addition to the 46% of respondents reporting that over half their workforce work remotely most of the time; 72% said that they use a hybrid model throughout the week. So many employees working remotely every day not only heightens the risk of a cyberattack, but also increases the complexity of asset management and data security processes.

These statistics highlight the sheer scale of the challenge before business leaders. Accounting for so many employees – who could each have multiple company devices – is no easy task if asset management has not been implemented historically. That means a nearly countless amount of potential entryways for cyber criminals to exploit; and unfortunately, one is usually all it takes.

However, businesses are in luck. The support for Windows 10 is coming to an end after October 2025, which means that you will have to adopt Windows 11 if you want to maintain accreditations such as Cyber Essentials – and considering how much it will ease asset management and endpoint management, it’s advisable to introduce it sooner rather than later.

So, what are the benefits to Windows 11?

Security measures
Windows 11 makes it more difficult for malware and viruses to affect your hardware, due to the fact that a physical processor, TPM 2.0, allows the OS to authenticate the PC being used – which makes hardware-based encryption much easier to implement and enhance.

Your devices are similarly protected from phishing attacks through Windows 11, thanks to features that effectively block some of the most common cyberattack methods by default.

These range from ensuring that only trusted applications can be run on your corporate devices, to automatic alerts when your people are entering Microsoft credentials into malicious applications or hacked websites.

Familiar Setup
For those doubting their team’s readiness to get to grips with a whole new OS, worry not – Windows 11 functions basically the same as Windows 10. This means that this upgrade will mean minimal disruption to your team’s productivity; allowing your business to enhance security for free, and all without impacting your output or standard of customer service.

‍Remote visibility  
Asset management is made simple with Windows 11 Cloud Configuration, which gives your admins easy visibility of the status of every corporate device in your fleet. The obvious advantages of this is that important communications can be sent directly to every corporate device in your business in a single admin message – and secure remote fixes can be co-ordinated stress-free.

‍Easy Updates  
As well as being a free upgrade, Windows 11 ensures that you are continually kept up to date with update deployments - but without disrupting your operations, with automated background updates 40% smaller and optimised to be completed as quickly and safely as possible.

Windows 11 is the default OS for all hardware provided through a Managed IT Service – which leases devices to a client for the purposes of generating cost-efficiencies, maximising uptime through ongoing support, and customising your devices to save you time.

If you are interested in how Windows 11 can help your business, speak to Apogee today by clicking here.