Westpac is upgrading over 40,000 staff machines to Windows 11

Westpac is upgrading 4000 corporate devices a week to Windows 11 Enterprise, setting Edge as its default browser and Bing as its “primary search engine” for staff in the process.

Details of the project were revealed in a case study published yesterday; it was previously only known to have been spoken about at a Microsoft-only event.

The bank is upgrading its operating system from Windows 10 to Windows 11 Enterprise in part because the newer OS has administrative features that are better suited to so-called hybrid working conditions.

Westpac said it now has “approximately 20,000 employees [that] regularly work from home each day” - roughly half of its “more than 40,000” staff.

Head of workplace and contact centre infrastructure Paul McKenna said the bank has hit scale with the upgrades - amounting to 4000 devices a week.

It is utilising Microsoft’s App Assure service to “resolve any compatibility issues” with corporate applications.

The bank said it had also provisioned about 3000 new devices as part of the upgrade program so far.

Microsoft said that Westpac has also “chosen Microsoft Edge as its default browser”, in part to run legacy applications in IE mode on Edge.

“We also wanted to take advantage of Bing, and it’s now our primary search engine,” McKenna said.

On the administrative side, Westpac said it has started using Windows Autopatch “to automate updates” to machines.

Digital workplace environment service owner Steve Congdon said Autopatch was useful for keeping up “with updates to device drivers across our mix of models and vendors.”

The bank said “major feature updates” also now took less than one-third of the time per machine - 25 minutes instead of 90 minutes - which will allow the bank to run two updates a year, instead of one.

Westpac last year signed a five-year Azure deal with Microsoft as part of its shift to cloud.