Managing AVD and Windows 365 Without Intune Complexity: How Hydra Changes the Workflow

March 19, 2026

When organizations move to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and Windows 365, they don’t just adopt a new virtual desktop platform, they inherit an entirely new management model.

At the center of that model is Intune.

Intune is Microsoft’s modern endpoint manager. It handles device compliance, provisioning policies, security baselines, conditional access, configuration profiles, user assignments, application deployment, and more. Every corporate laptop, Cloud PC, and enrolled endpoint likely runs through it.

And that’s exactly the problem.

Intune wasn’t designed as a VDI-native operational control plane. It was designed as a broad endpoint management system. For teams trying to run AVD and Windows 365 at scale, that distinction matters.

The Reality of Managing Windows 365 and AVD Natively

To properly provision and operate Windows 365 Cloud PCs and AVD environments using native Microsoft tooling, administrators typically navigate:

• The Microsoft 365 Admin Center (for licensing and Cloud PC entitlement)
• The Azure Portal (for networking, host pools, virtual machines, Entra ID, and infrastructure)
• Intune (for device compliance, provisioning policies, configuration, and endpoint security)

That’s not an exaggeration. It’s three separate management surfaces, each with its own role-based access model and each with its own structure, terminology, and logic. If you’re coming from Citrix or Omnissa, where management lived in a single console, this feels fragmented immediately.

Here’s what’s required to provision a Windows 365 Cloud PC:

• Purchase and assign the correct license (with multiple licensing models depending on user and machine type)
• Configure networking (Microsoft-managed or enterprise network)
• Define provisioning policies
• Create and Attach images
• Configure compliance rules
• Apply configuration profiles
• Assign users and groups
• Validate enrollment and health
• Confirm Intune device compliance

Provisioning policies alone require stitching together licensing, networking, image selection, device join type, and assignments.

That’s before troubleshooting.

Based on Login VSI industry data, provisioning a single Cloud PC the “right way” can take over an hour (even when everything is aligned).

Why “Ingesting Intune” Doesn’t Fix the Problem

Some AVD and Windows 365 management solutions try to solve this by ingesting everything from Intune and displaying it in their own interface.

The result? You still have all the complexity, it’s just mirrored somewhere else.

Every policy. Every configuration option. Every edge case. Every toggle.

Nothing is simplified. Nothing is streamlined. It’s still Intune, just in a different wrapper.

That approach assumes the problem is where Intune lives. The real problem is that Intune was never built around how VDI administrators actually operate day-to-day.

VDI admins don’t wake up thinking about compliance policy inheritance trees. They think about:

• Is this host healthy?
• Why is this session slow right now?
• Can I roll out this image safely?
• Can I move this workload from AVD to Windows 365?
• Why is this user’s Cloud PC misbehaving?
• How do I provision 200 desktops quickly without spending the next two days in three portals?

Those are the real operational questions.

Hydra’s Approach to AVD and Windows 365 Management: Orchestrate Around Intune

Hydra serves as the operational control plane for AVD and Windows 365 management. It brings day-to-day desktop operations into one focused, admin-friendly interface designed for how VDI teams actually work.

Intune continues to handle compliance, identity, and endpoint policy, while Hydra streamlines the operational layer around it: provisioning, image control, session management, and machine actions so teams can run desktops without juggling multiple portals.

That means:

• Provisioning workflows that focus on speed and repeatability
• Image lifecycle management built for VDI admins
• Networking and host pool operations from a single control plane
• Real-time session visibility via the Hydra agent (<5-second telemetry, not delayed analytics)
• Direct actions: restart, reprovision, snapshot, restore, drain, resize, or migrate
• The ability to trigger an Intune sync from the machine itself when needed

Instead of recreating every Intune setting, Hydra focuses on what VDI teams actually need to do day-to-day, and provisioning becomes a coordinated workflow instead of a multi-console project.

What used to take an hour per device becomes minutes, and teams can immediately validate that new machines are healthy, without waiting on delayed analytics.

Built for VDI Admins: AVD and Windows 365 Management for Teams Coming from Citrix and Omnissa Horizon

Microsoft is clearly positioning Windows 365 as the long-term cloud desktop end state, but most enterprises moving there are not starting from scratch. They’re coming from:

• Citrix
• Omnissa Horizon
• Traditional VDI
• Hybrid AVD environments

Those teams are used to centralized operational control. They’re not used to:

• Managing provisioning policies across multiple web consoles
• Licensing complexity before deployment even begins
• Troubleshooting via delayed analytics feeds
• Re-learning how to run EUC from scratch

That’s why we designed Hydra to preserve operational continuity. You shouldn’t have to relearn how to run VDI just because your infrastructure moved to the cloud.

Intune Isn’t the Enemy. Complexity Is.

Intune manages compliance and policy. But running Windows in the Cloud requires an operational layer made for VDI administrators. One that reduces portal hopping, speeds up provisioning, and gives teams clarity day to day.

Hydra gives teams that layer: a simpler, more focused way to run AVD and Windows 365 without the complexity.

If managing AVD or Windows 365 feels harder than it should, it’s worth seeing how this looks in your own environment.

Start a 30-day trial or request a quick walkthrough, and decide from there.