MS Inspire 2019: Microsoft introduces Azure Lighthouse to enable centralized management of Azure tenants

Microsoft launched Azure Lighthouse in general availability combined with some improvements to the Azure Migration Program ahead this MS Inspire 2019 conference that is underway in Las Vegas.

Basically, Azure Lighthouse will offer service providers a single environment to manage Azure resources across different customers. It will offer capabilities for managed service providers (MSPs) that aim to reduce the customer on-boarding dramatically and bring all customer resources into a single view.

Azure Lighthouse “puts Azure management features of all your customers into one pane, one view,” said Toby Richards, GM of Microsoft’s Partner One Commercial Partner organization. It will cut down MS partners’ customer on-boarding time by 71%, he commented.

The solution will provide enhanced automation, efficiency and overall, improve the managed experience for Azure Cloud platform. Its capabilities will also facilitate cross-tenant management of customers with enhanced visibility and control- empowering partners to service more customers and handle larger workloads.

“It’s not only great from a customer onboarding perspective, but it also allows you to build into new managed services that really take advantage of that feature, to be able to apply that across all your customers (is exciting)”, Richards added.




The prime challenge faced by all Azure MSPs is that dealing with various customers at scale or even large single customers means encountering lots of subscription proliferation. Thus, jumping from one console to another, setting-up custom rights as per account requirements (that can extend to multiple subscriptions) to enable operations across tenants is cumbersome and prone to error. Azure Lighthouse enables managed service providers to define a set of permissions and apply them to an internal team.

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