You may have already heard the term Azure Lighthouse but what does it mean? And why is it important? We sat down with our Cloud Practice Manager, John Riseam, to find out more about Azure Lighthouse and discuss how Cloud Direct is utilising this recently released Microsoft technology to centralise and optimise our Azure operations.

First off, can you explain what Azure Lighthouse is?

Azure Lighthouse has been designed by Microsoft for service providers, like Cloud Direct, as a single dashboard to view and manage Azure subscriptions centrally and securely. Before Microsoft developed this tech there was a huge administrative overhead required to connect MSP’s with their customer tenants and challenging security access. But now Azure Lighthouse is an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) that lets customers delegate permissions to their MSP to perform management operations on their behalf.

So, how is Cloud Direct using this new technology?

Azure Lighthouse lets us securely and seamlessly access our customer environments and is now our default management plane for all our customers, whether they’re using CSP, EA or PAYG Azure subscriptions. The key benefit to us is the visibility of all our customer tenants in one central portal with the increased management tools which allow our teams to simultaneously monitor and optimise our customers Azure networks more efficiently.

What’s the benefit for Cloud Direct’s customers?

We’re able to further enhance the security we offer customers using technologies such as Microsoft 2 factor authentication, Conditional Access and Advanced Threat protection. Azure Lighthouse also allows us to have a centralised set of security policies that we can apply to all our customers at the same time. So, any patches or new best practice policies can be quickly and efficiently applied.

In addition to these optimisation and security benefits, Azure Lighthouse has also enabled us to develop new managed service offerings, to give our customers even more opportunities to optimise and scale their Azure environments.

Where can people find out more about this and other Azure technologies?

As an Azure Expert MSP, we have an extremely close relationship with Microsoft and pride ourselves on being at the forefront of new Azure technologies and management best practice. All of which we share with our customers to develop and optimise the managed services. Just ask your account manager or take a look at the resources available on our website.

My team of Azure Experts also host regular workshops and events for our current and prospective customers, where they share their best practice top tips and delve into the latest Azure tech. This month we have our Azure landing zone webinar on 30^th January, then on the 12^th March, we’ll be at Microsoft London Paddington for our thirteenth Azure Roadshow workshop.

Find out more about all our upcoming events here.