Crocs supports its prolific global growth and saves $250,000 a year with Windows 365

No matter who you are, Crocs wants the shoes you wear to match the personality you bring into the world. In delivering that customer experience, the worldwide seller of iconic, comfortable footwear has undergone incredibly rapid growth. The organization has achieved record revenue growth for the last five years standing. Providing technology services that can keep pace with that growth can be challenging, but the company has long focused on driving forward with what’s new and most cost-effective for the organization. In recent years, it’s become a proponent of cloud-first strategies.

Since joining the company in 2018, Scott Czarnecki, Senior Director of Global IT Infrastructure at Crocs, has focused on implementing advanced technology and facilitating ease-of-use for the company’s more than 8,000 global employees. He has also prioritized simplifying systems management, enhancing security, and generating financial savings. “My goal is to pair our highly skilled technology experts with modern, sophisticated solutions that accentuate their skills,” he says, adding that fivefold growth over five years requires nimbleness amid constant change. “For this reason, among others, our prevailing strategy is to adopt Microsoft solutions whenever possible.”

Czarnecki immediately identified the company’s virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) as a prime candidate for modernization. “Our previous virtualized environment wasn’t scalable for the growth that the business was experiencing,” he says. In addition to being costly, difficult to manage, complex to maintain, and a leading source of service outages, their VDI solution also required specialized service contracts for partner support. And because Crocs used it for many business functions, the cost structure and complexity would only become more problematic as the company expands operations into new markets. “I don't want to have to manage servers anymore because there’s no value in patching servers or troubleshooting crashing operating systems.”

Instead of replacing the company’s aging infrastructure, Czarnecki wanted a new solution that would not only ease the financial burden but also improve the experience for administrators and users. Crocs Senior Infrastructure Architect Ryan Ellison found the answer: Windows 365, which gives workers access to a full, personalized Windows experience from a Cloud PC on any device. Windows 365 Cloud PCs are simple to manage, use technology that Crocs employees and contractors are already familiar with, and provide scalability and global availability. “We’re moving away from on-premises infrastructure into a world that fully embraces cloud architecture and services,” says Ellison “Microsoft Intune and Windows 365 are perfect for managing company devices and service delivery, and our employees immediately have compliant core applications and settings moments after provisioning.”

This aligned well with Czarnecki’s strategy of consolidating services and managing more with less. The Crocs end-user compute team already had the expertise needed to deploy and manage Windows 365, the adoption of which helped maximize the company’s existing technology investments and increase its speed to onboard contractors, vendors, and remote employees from days to minutes. “After we fully cut everyone over to Windows 365, there was about $250,000 a year in cost savings alone, not to mention we were able to support our users more efficiently and effectively,” says Czarnecki’s. “It was a paradigm shift for the business.”

Improved access and support for all

Crocs relies heavily on contractors, and in the past, it had to generate an account for each, create a new virtual machine, and populate it with the apps the contractor needed. Crocs simplified this time-consuming process with a faster and easier provisioning approach. It now gives its contractors—who make up one of the company’s largest Windows 365 user groups—Cloud PCs and use Microsoft 365 Groups for numerous contractor types and add them to an appropriate group. By focusing on identity rather than virtualization, users can access the right apps and Microsoft Teams groups and other collaboration channels on a variety of devices. “Switching to Windows 365 Cloud PCs has substantially simplified how we onboard contractors and manage their interactions across our environment,” says Czarnecki. “And when a contract is done, we just shut down the Cloud PC to remove access.”

The experience for contractors and employees outside the United States has especially improved with Windows 365. The company’s contact center workers in Europe and its accounts payable departments in Asia Pacific now all use Cloud PCs daily. They can access all the company apps, data, and communication channels they need with lower latency and exponentially increased performance thanks to the company’s use of Azure global infrastructure. Because the company’s previous solution was based in the United States, workers who accessed their virtualized desktops from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia Pacific often had sub-optimal experiences.  With over 160 active Azure data centers in 60 regions around the world supporting Windows 365, often in the same country as users, these groups now have greatly reduced latency, which has led to improved productivity. “With Windows 365, we can stand up our tenant in different regions and build Cloud PCs in locations that provide our global contractors with fast, easy access,” says Ellison. “It also empowers them to use their Crocs-provided Microsoft 365 accounts, which makes it easier to support them in Teams or Outlook.”

Contractors previously lacked Microsoft 365 accounts of their own, so Crocs support teams could only help them on the phone. This limited the remediation options when contractors faced technical issues. “We’ve really improved our support model,” says Maddie Pierce, Manager of IT Support Operations at Crocs. “Contractors themselves can restart their Cloud PCs, they can sign out and sign back in. Our support staff also have far more troubleshooting options to try before escalating tickets to our engineers.” This is especially important given the company’s global workforce. “We’ve got multiple customer service teams across the globe in offices, working remotely, and a mix of both,” she adds. “Their ability to transition seamlessly between home or work PCs and Cloud PCs is fast, efficient, and familiar. Because Windows 365 is easy to support, we can craft it so that the solution fits users’ needs.”

Keeping company data highly secure

Adopting Windows 365 alongside other Microsoft solutions has already paid dividends for Crocs in terms of data security. Giving support staff increased, often real-time visibility into each Cloud PC is only the beginning. The company’s use of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint, Microsoft Intune, Microsoft Sentinel, and Windows 365 together has greatly increased the granularity of its data security controls. “By continuing to invest in Microsoft infrastructure and deploying Windows 365, we’ve extended our data loss prevention protocols to our Cloud PCs,” says Czarnecki. Crocs now has the flexibility to allow users to sign in from unmanaged devices to an internal environment that’s always visible, updated, and highly secure. ”We can see data exfiltration and data that doesn’t belong in our organization,” adds Ellison. “It’s invaluable to have built-in Microsoft security tools.”

With Windows 365, contractors can no longer copy or paste Crocs data. The company also set up file controls on the Cloud PCs so that contractors can only share files through approved channels like Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. “We’ve extended the corporate policies that manage our physical assets to our Windows 365 Cloud PCs, along with our existing application mechanisms and update processes,” explains Ellison. “That goes a long way toward unifying our control plane and eliminating our need for solution-specific support contractors.”

The switch to Windows 365 ushered in two other important changes. First, Crocs eliminated the need for VPNs, a practice it viewed as a potential security risk. Second, the company standardized its Cloud PC users on Windows 11 Enterprise, which provides the company with the newest Windows features and controls, better performance, and increased efficiency and productivity. Contractors gain secure access to Crocs apps and data through a well-protected, compliant Windows experience on their personalized Cloud PCs, greatly reducing the chances of inadvertently breaching their Crocs contracts by using unapproved workarounds to accomplish their job tasks.

Powering the continued global reach of Crocs

Crocs leaders feel confident that they’ve achieved the agility, versatility, simplified management, and ease of use they set out to gain. And because Windows 365 works so well with the rest of the company’s Microsoft infrastructure, Czarnecki sees it as a longer-term solution than its previous solution. “When you look at the indirect benefits of Windows 365, you find its greatest value,” says Czarnecki. “We’ve internalized and simplified our support process, and everyone working for Crocs can now access our business-critical apps without outages or errors.”

Because of its forward-leaning adoption of modern solutions and cloud-first technologies, Crocs remains well positioned to support its continuing growth. “Windows 365 Cloud PCs have allowed us to keep pace with the business’s incredible growth over the last five years, and we see it being able to continue to scale with the exponential growth into the future,” concludes Czarnecki. “If keeping up with company growth is your target, Windows 365 is unquestionably the way to go. If you want to enhance your IT offerings and overall security posture, then Windows 365 is a no-brainer. The cloud is the future and Microsoft is the company to deliver it.”