Microsoft 365 Lighthouse Signals Redmond’s Pending Big RMM Play

The new Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is a managed services delivery platform the company will preview to partners starting next year.

Microsoft revealed its planned IT service delivery offering during last month’s Ignite virtual conference for IT pros and developers. The company plans to release the first preview of Microsoft 365 Lighthouse early next year. It is primarily intended for MSPs who manage small and medium-size businesses that use Microsoft 365.

The interface provides a multitenant management control plane, letting MSPs remotely manage each customer’s Microsoft 365 instance. It is oriented toward MSPs that have many small and medium-size business customers. Microsoft 365 Lighthouse builds off last year’s introduction of Azure Lighthouse, which lets partners manage their customers’ Azure instances.

MSPs using Microsoft 365 Lighthouse will be able to provide standardized device monitoring, management and compliance for their SMB customers.

Microsoft’s Vivek Kumar

“Microsoft 365 Lighthouse will help you reduce your operational overhead by enabling you to onboard, monitor and manage your Microsoft 365 customers from one place,” according to the announcement posted by Vivek Kumar, a Microsoft senior product marketing manager.

Kumar added that Microsoft 365 Lighthouse is “a new experience that makes it easier for IT partners to deliver managed services at scale to small and medium-sized customers. You will be able to drive higher levels of standardization, automation and auditing in how you work with customers.”

Managing Multiple Tenants

Microsoft 365 Lighthouse will allow MSP support engineers to review all of their SMB customers in one pane. The software builds on the functionality of Microsoft Intune and Windows Auto Pilot. It also includes threat management, allowing support engineers to monitor the status of Microsoft Defender AV across all Windows 10 clients under management. Furthermore, it automates user access management, providing a unified list of all users MSPs manage across their customer bases.

Kumar said this will make it easier to reset passwords, assign licenses and delegate access to mailboxes and OneDrive. Also, MSPs’ technicians can change group memberships without having to log in and log out of individual customer tenants. It will also provide alerts of violations or other threats detected.

Chris Boyd, a Microsoft program manager, said many MSPs lack tools to manage multitenant SMB environments.

“Through a number of conversations with our partner community, we’ve realized there’s an opportunity to really help their technicians in their day-to-day activities,” Boyd said during a Microsoft Ignite session. “These are the folks that are helping the SMBs work through issues like password resets or setting up a team site around a new big collaborative initiative. They’re doing this while also remotely monitoring and managing the health and security of all the devices and services across the SMBs that they take care of. We really feel there’s an opportunity to provide them a solution that works cross tenant to discover and resolve issues, and also help them …