Every Managed Service Provider (MSP) has a vision and strategy for managing their customers’ tenants. Microsoft 365 Lighthouse helps them realize that vision and execute that strategy, at scale, better than ever before, with the ability to customize baselines based on their unique expertise and tailored to their customers’ needs.
In this article, we'll examine what custom baselines are, why they matter, and how they can help you grow your managed services business.
What are custom baselines?
One of the best things about Lighthouse is the default baseline we provide that makes it easy for you to deploy a standardized set of configurations to your customers’ tenants that make them healthy, secure, and productive. However, a “one-size-fits-all” approach may not be suitable for you – or all your customers.
By creating your own baselines, you can define your standards for security, compliance, and productivity and leverage the power of Lighthouse to deploy those standards across your customers' tenants – and enforce them.
Your baselines can include any combination of tasks from the default baseline and configurations extracted from other tenants you manage such as conditional access policies, device management policies and profiles, Windows Autopilot profiles, and more.
Why custom baselines are awesome
There are many reasons to create your own baselines. Some of the key scenarios that our partners are excited about include:
- Creating baselines that are more comprehensive or more stringent than the default baseline.
- Accommodating various licensing models.
- Addressing the needs of specific industries and verticals.
- Ensuring compliance with specific regulatory requirements.
- Aligning with their managed service offerings
The Baselines page of Microsoft 365 Lighthouse.
Partners are discovering that baselines aren’t just a set of configurations, but a foundational element of their marketing strategy, sales motion, operations, and customer lifecycle.
How to create your own baselines
To start creating your own baselines, navigate to the Baselines page in the Microsoft 365 Lighthouse portal.
From there, you can create your own baseline in 3 easy steps:
1. Make your baseline by either cloning an existing baseline, importing a baseline, or starting from scratch.
Animation of cloning a custom baseline in Lighthouse.
2. Add deployment tasks by cloning them from another baseline or extracting a configuration from a customer tenant.
Animation of adding a task from another baseline to your custom baseline.
Animation of adding a task from a configuration extracted from a customer tenant to your custom baseline.
3. Assign your baseline to your customers' tenants so that Lighthouse can scan the tenants to tell you whether and to what degree they are already compliant with your new baseline. Then you can use our deployment insights to make sure all your tenants are configured exactly how you want them!
Animation of assigning your custom baseline to a tenant.
Regardless of where you are on the journey to zero trust, baselines can help you optimize and scale your work. For example:
- If you're starting and want to quickly ensure that your customers are healthy, secure, and productive, deploying the default baseline is a great start!
- But, if you decide to get a bit more granular and want to strengthen your customers' security posture beyond what is provided in the default baseline, you can clone the default baseline, add your desired task to it, and you're good to go!
- If you're a seasoned pro who's meticulously developed a comprehensive and stringent set of policies and profiles for your customers, you can start from scratch and extract those configurations and mirror them across your other customers' tenants.
To learn more about Microsoft 365 Lighthouse:
- Sign up for Microsoft 365 Lighthouse
- Review our Microsoft 365 Lighthouse Technical Documentation
- Read Overview of using Microsoft 365 Lighthouse baselines to deploy standard tenant configurations
- Check out the Protect Customers with Baselines Interactive Demo
Updated Mar 21, 2024
Version 2.0
Raaj_Govind
Microsoft
Microsoft
