Almost everything else has moved already. Email, files, the accounting system, often the phones. The one piece of office equipment still tied to a desk is the computer itself, and it’s the piece that decides whether someone can actually work today.
If you split your week between the office and home, you know how that feels. One of those two places has your real machine on it, with the shortcuts, the line of business software and the files you never got around to putting in OneDrive. The other has something slower that you put up with.
Microsoft’s answer is to move the whole computer, not just the files. The product is Windows 365 and the machine it hands you is called a Cloud PC.
What is a Cloud PC?
Microsoft describes a Cloud PC as a virtual machine that gives the user a full Windows desktop, hosted by the Windows 365 service and reachable from anywhere, on any device.
The part that matters for a small business is the ownership model. In Windows 365 Business, Enterprise and Government, each person has their own Cloud PC. It’s not a shared session on a terminal server, and it isn’t a locked down kiosk. It’s a Windows desktop with its own settings, its own installed apps and its own files, running in a Microsoft data centre instead of under a desk. You assign a licence to a person and the Cloud PC builds itself, usually within about 30 minutes.
The versions, and which one a small business would buy
There are five, and most people only need to know the first two.
- Windows 365 Business is built for smaller companies, up to 300 seats. Simple management, and Microsoft lists no licensing prerequisites to set it up.
- Windows 365 Enterprise has no seat limit and lets you build Cloud PCs from your own Windows image, with full device management behind it.
- Windows 365 Government covers regulated United States government customers.
- Windows 365 Flex provisions up to three Cloud PCs on one licence for people who use them at different times of the day, rather than all at once.
- Windows 365 for Agents is a preview product for AI agents, not staff.
What it costs in Australia
Microsoft publishes the Windows 365 Business plans in Australian dollars, per user per month:
- Basic, 2 vCPU with 4 GB RAM and 128 GB storage, AU$52.40
- Standard, 2 vCPU with 8 GB RAM and 128 GB storage, AU$67.30
- Premium, 4 vCPU with 16 GB RAM and 128 GB storage, AU$104.80
That’s the whole computer, billed like a mobile plan. Compare it against what you actually spend on a laptop over three years, including the replacement you didn’t plan for, not against the sticker price of the cheapest machine in the shop.
Getting to it
Users reach a Cloud PC through the Windows App on Windows, Mac, iOS or Android, or through a browser at windows.cloud.microsoft on Windows, macOS, ChromeOS or Linux. There’s also a small desk device, Windows 365 Link, that boots straight to a Cloud PC.
Worth knowing if you’re planning this now: Microsoft ended support for the Remote Desktop client for Windows on 27 March 2026 and points everyone at the Windows App instead. If your notes or an old internal guide still tell staff to use Remote Desktop, they’re out of date.
Where a Cloud PC earns its money
The machine follows the person. Travel stops being a risk to your data. If a laptop is dropped, stolen or left in a taxi, the desktop and everything on it is still sitting in the cloud and the person can pick it up on a borrowed device.
Starting and stopping people gets fast. Assign a licence and a configured desktop exists in half an hour. Remove the licence and the desktop goes with it. Compare that to couriering a laptop to a new starter, or chasing one that left with someone in December.
The device in someone’s house matters less. When the work happens inside the Cloud PC, the home machine is a screen and a keyboard. That changes what you have to worry about on a personal laptop you don’t control and can’t patch.
Where it bites
No connection, no computer. This is the one that catches people, and it’s not theoretical. Across the twelve months to 18 August 2026, our service desk logged 36 tickets from five client businesses where someone couldn’t connect to a hosted virtual desktop. Not one of those was a fault with the desktop itself. They were connections: a dropout at the user’s end, a device that wouldn’t reconnect after a restart, a black screen at sign in. A normal laptop with a flaky connection still opens Word. A Cloud PC doesn’t.
A slow line is worse than a slow PC. Latency shows up in the mouse pointer. People forgive a computer that takes ten seconds to open a spreadsheet far more readily than they forgive a cursor that lags behind their hand all day. Before you buy anything, test the connection at the sites and the homes where it will be used, especially uploads.
You’re accepting Microsoft’s uptime as your own. Microsoft publishes a service health page in the admin centre and a public status site, which is useful the day something breaks and useless as a substitute for a plan. Decide in advance what your team does for the hours nobody can sign in.
Restore points are not a backup. Windows 365 keeps restore points: on Business, ten short term ones taken every 12 hours, plus four long term ones taken every seven days, with the oldest dropping off as new ones arrive. That’s a genuinely useful safety net, and it’s not a backup regime. A restore rolls the whole disk back and loses every change made since that point, including installed apps and downloads. If the data matters, back it up properly and keep it somewhere other than the Cloud PC.
Who it actually suits
A Cloud PC is a good fit for office work on a decent connection: accounts, admin, professional services, anyone who lives in Microsoft 365 and a browser based business system. It’s a good fit for shared or seasonal roles, and for anyone who has to use an unmanaged device.
It’s a poor fit for heavy graphics, CAD and video work, for sites where the internet drops out in the wet season, and for anyone tied to specialised hardware such as label printers, scanners or dongles, which can usually be made to work but is where the setup time goes.
The honest version is that a Cloud PC moves your risk rather than removing it. You stop worrying about failing hard drives and stolen laptops, and you start worrying about your internet. For a lot of Brisbane businesses that’s a trade worth making. For a workshop on a shaky link, it isn’t.
The one step for today: before you price a single licence, run a speed test at every place this would be used, at the busiest time of day, and write down the upload figure as well as the download.
If you’d like a second opinion on whether your connection and your software would cope, get in touch.