The cloud represents one of the biggest growth opportunities for managed service providers (MSPs) and other service providers to support their clients with the latest technologies.
One tool available to help MSPs take hold of the unlimited opportunity offered by the cloud is Azure Lighthouse. The tool helps MSPs implement and manage multi-tenant cloud environments for their customers, which is an architecture that lets customers share cloud resources in a secure and isolated way.
Leveraging a multi-tenant cloud environment helps lower costs, increase scalability, and more efficiently leverage resources for the customer for the MSP by managing dozens or even hundreds of applications and environments within a single pane of glass. This could allow an MSP to potentially command higher margins or pass savings along to their customers — a win in either case.
There are many reasons for an MSP to consider a tool like Azure Lighthouse. Here are a few capabilities that the tool can bring to their business and how they can take advantage:
Access control
By leveraging Azure Lighthouse, customers have the power to decide the full scope of access for MSP providers. This helps ensure security by ensuring least privilege access to outside providers, which is especially important when supply chain attacks on MSPs continue to increase. This also protects the MSP by ensuring they don’t become a liability to their customers.
Azure Lighthouse makes it easier than ever before for MSPs to accomplish these tasks by allowing them to automate the required runbooks rather than requiring them to get created individually for each client. MSPs also don’t need to create multiple administrator accounts for each client; instead, they manage them within their own Active Directory tenant.
Security
Cybersecurity is becoming an increasingly important service for every MSP to offer to their customers. This is equally important for cloud environments. By leveraging Azure Lighthouse, MSPs can more easily monitor security alerts and compliance and security policies in one place across different customer environments (instead of managing each individually). It also allows MSPs to correct any necessary actions to ensure cybersecurity protections and standards are in place.
Costs and potential benefits
There is no additional cost for an MSP or a customer to leverage Azure Lighthouse to manage their resources across multi-tenant environments. The only requirement is that they are an Azure customer, which they likely are if they are exploring the product in the first place.
For MSPs, tools like this help ensure they offer their clients the latest and greatest benefits and technologies while streamlining their businesses and optimizing them for future success. With those two benefits in mind, it could be a win-win for an MSP and its customers.
