Azure Lighthouse—managing cloud, hybrid, and edge environments at-scale through a single control plane

Thousands of partners and enterprises use Azure Lighthouse to manage services across Azure tenants, representing tens of thousands of subscriptions and more than one million Azure resources from Azure Resource Manager—a unified control plane. With Azure Lighthouse, service providers, as well as self-managing enterprises, can achieve higher operational efficiency using Azure’s comprehensive and robust management tools. You can now view and manage resources, with higher automation, scale, and enhanced governance across hybrid estates and on-premises.

It is common for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to service customer resources across hybrid estates and on-premises environments. Many MSP partners rely on Azure Lighthouse, and now Azure Arc, to achieve a unified management solution in these advanced scenarios. MSPs can extend their service offerings to manage their customers’ on-premises environments through Azure Resource Manager, managing resources at scale and governing compliance using Azure policy.

ClearDATA—delivering robust governance across hybrid environments for healthcare customers

Using Azure Lighthouse, Azure Policy, and Azure Arc, ClearDATA—an Azure Expert MSP—provides compliance insights to enterprise customers in regulated industries, such as healthcare. Azure Arc enables ClearDATA to easily perform virtual machine inventories in hybrid environments, while Azure Policy used with Azure Lighthouse helps them to achieve consistency, security, and compliance across all of their customers in all of the clouds and private datacenters or branch offices the customers use.

ClearDATA provides compliance state insights across hybrid environments to enterprise customers.

“ClearDATA’s HIPAA compliant and HITRUST 9.1 certified solutions on Azure help enterprise organizations easily transition and accelerate their move to the cloud with greater confidence. A rich library of compliance reference architecture for Azure services, coupled with our unique Automated Safeguards and Remediation technology, unlocks the true potential of Azure Lighthouse and Azure cloud. Our visual and easy-to-use compliance dashboard and flexible reports provide transparency and visibility needed to demonstrate compliance.”—Suhas Kelkar, Chief Product Officer, ClearDATA.

Yorktel—monitoring customer edge devices

Yorktel manages health states of Microsoft collaboration devices (Surface Hubs 1, 2, and Microsoft Teams Rooms), including displays, microphones, cameras, speakers, and Microsoft Teams’ real-time features, on-behalf of its end-customers. By pivoting to Azure Monitor as their primary monitoring tool, and Azure Lighthouse as their secure access mechanism, Yorktel is shaking up edge device management. Consolidated views across all its customers provides Yorktel with comprehensive oversight, enabling timely alerts that trigger response workflows for speedy problem resolution. Azure Lighthouse has created smoother user experiences and higher customer satisfaction.

Yorktel’s Azure-based monitoring workflow for edge devices.

“Yorktel’s Azure Lighthouse enabled monitoring and management solution couldn’t have come at a better time. As the post-COVID-19 world prepares to return to work, this proactive problem and resolution technology presents the potential for dramatic impact, both for managed services providers and their customers. The efficiencies generated by faster, large-scale problem resolution will allow companies to focus on the strategic and transformational initiatives that will help them grow and acclimate to the post-COVID-19 world, rather than the tactical, day-to-day ‘keeping the lights on’.” —Jeremy Short, SVP of Microsoft Solutions, Yorktel

Vandis—delivering managed network services

Azure Lighthouse has also enabled multiple service providers, such as Azure Networking MSPs, to build and operate optimized hybrid connectivity from customer premises to customer subscriptions in Azure. Vandis, for example, uses Azure Lighthouse to plan, build, and operate a hybrid network for customers based on Azure Virtual WAN and Azure Express Route.

“Azure Lighthouse has enabled us to expand our Network-as-a-Service Platform to our customers as well as drive work-from-home solutions such as Windows Virtual Desktop on Azure.” —Ryan Young, CTO, Vandis

Azure Lighthouse—continuing to innovate for management-at-scale scenarios in Azure

Congratulations to all our partners who continue to add value to our joint customers with enhanced services for managing Azure and hybrid estates. Our team is as motivated as ever to innovate for our partner ecosystem, and we’ve been constantly adding new Azure Lighthouse capabilities as a result.

Here are a few highlights:

• Service providers can now trigger notification and onboarding workflows for their teams, in their own Azure control plane, through activity logs that monitor customers’ resource delegation actions.
• Customers can now upgrade their managed services offers inside their own Azure portal experiences, in service providers views, rather than visiting other portals or marketplaces.
• Automation tools of choice across command-line interface (CLI), APIs (subscription function), and PowerShell can now display managed and managing tenant context of an Azure subscription.
• Service providers can opt-out of managing customer delegated Azure scopes, on their own, to accelerate compliance and offboarding needs.
• Azure Backup Explorer and Backup reports now offer cross-customer consolidated views for service providers, driving operator efficiency.
• Azure Lighthouse is now a FEDRAMP High certified service available in Microsoft Azure Government.
• Partners can now draft and publish managed services offers to the Azure Marketplace directly from the Partner Center, streamlining offer and lead management into a single portal.
• Azure Lighthouse Help and Support experiences have been enhanced, including recommended solutions for common issues, empowering managing tenants with more insights to solve issues themselves.

And that’s a wrap for Build 2020 with Azure Lighthouse. I cannot wait to share more with you at Inspire 2020 in July. In the meantime, check out our new Azure Lighthouse learning content.