According to reports, Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is a new platform for managed service providers. It will hit the market sometime next year. If you’re an MSP looking for a way to deploy, manage, and monitor services at scale for small to medium-sized businesses, then you might have questions.
This short guide breaks down what we know so far.
What is Microsoft 365 Lighthouse for Managed Service Providers?
Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is a platform to empower MSPs with standardization that streamlines processes to ensure reliable services. Lighthouse provides a set of fundamentals to support technicians in areas of:
- Scale
- Automation
- Security
That means dependable remote monitoring, support with security best practices, and increased efficiency.
How Does Microsoft 365 Lighthouse Assure Scalability?
As a managed service provider, you work with various software and applications that you must somehow integrate into a reliable network system. Microsoft 365 Lighthouse seamlessly assimilates with computer APIs and documentation that aligns with MSP scenarios such as increasing and upgrading IT capacity. It offers tools to drive consistency across tenants, helping MSPs scale their business.
For example, Microsoft 365 Lighthouse provides secured scoped access so MSPs can seamlessly integrate administrative tasks for customer tenants on their behalf, across a broad scope. In other words, Lighthouse enables monitoring and management of device compliance across your client base from one place. The platform’s scalability enables partners to grow their business through simplified and repeatable processes, such as implementing a streamlined password reset for better user experience.
What About Automation?
The multi-tenant tools help set up automation in a sensible way and assist MSPs with day-to-day activities such as working through password resets or setting up a team site for collaboration. Additionally, remote monitoring and managing of health and security of devices and services for all of your clients’ are manageable with automation. Automated cross-tenant discovery ensures that you can resolve issues and maintain standards consistently and reliably within secure environments.
How Does Microsoft 365 Lighthouse Protect Against Security Threats?
Device compliance enables the MSPs to set standards on the devices that are accessing the resources. It provides visibility across all the devices you’re managing, and how they get evaluated, so you can take action when a particular device isn’t meeting set standards. The user management interface makes risky behaviors visible to the technician to quickly identify the user and take the appropriate action, either blocking the account or changing the password.
Informational cards on the home page help technicians understand device compliance and how Microsoft Defender is protecting the customer sites. The device compliance card provides an overview of evaluations against organizational policies, and the Microsoft Defender antivirus threat landscape offers an overview of past threats.
Additionally, the Microsoft Defender antivirus protection card enables an MSP to develop a clear understanding of which devices are protected or not protected with Microsoft Windows Defender. M365 Lighthouse also has a device compliance chart with a display of trends over time to understand if there’s been a significant change.
Do You Want to Find Out More About Microsoft 365 Lighthouse?
You’ll need to have Microsoft Intune set up and configured with the appropriate policies. Additionally, establish delegated access permissions for each of your customers with global admin permissions through dap. That way, Microsoft can access your customer sites to pull in the insights required for M365 Lighthouse. Then you’ll be able to apply the various settings across your customer sites.
Microsoft designed these solutions to deploy, manage, monitor, and support at scale the Microsoft 365 services you’ve sold. Does M365 Lighthouse sound like an option you might want to try? You can participate in its development if you register for early access in the first part of 2021.
