Hello folks
I partnered with the product group and actual IT professionals outside of Microsoft to create a video series where we look at Azure Lighthouse and its benefits from a variety of different perspectives.
Have you thought about how you can safely provide support to a customer with their Azure subscription? How you can help your customers manage their environment efficiently without using bespoke tools and processes? And all the while lightening the administrative burden that comes with managing the access levels, invitation, and directory listings.
Well, stay tuned because today we’ll discuss exactly that with James Brookbanks, Chief Technology Officer at Rhipe
Why Azure Lighthouse
Azure Lighthouse enables multi-tenant management with scalability, higher automation, and enhanced governance across resources. It enables you to deliver services using tooling built into Azure. Your customers maintain complete control over who has access to their tenant, which resources they can access, and what actions can be taken.
Users can see what changes were made and by whom in the activity log, which is stored in the customer's tenant and can be viewed by users in the managing tenant
Some of the benefits include:
- Management at scale: Customer engagement and life-cycle operations to manage customer resources are easier and more scalable. Existing APIs, management tools, and workflows can be used with delegated resources, including machines hosted outside of Azure, regardless of the regions in which they're located.
- Greater visibility and control for your customers: They have complete control over the scopes they delegate for management and the permissions that are allowed. They can your actions and remove access completely at any time. Greatly simplifying the “offboarding process” once the project or the contract is over
- Comprehensive and unified platform tooling: Azure Lighthouse works with existing tools and APIs, Azure managed applications
And….
It’s free! There are no additional costs associated with using Azure Lighthouse to manage Azure resources. Any Azure customer or partner can use Azure Lighthouse.
Onboard a customer to Azure Lighthouse
There are a few ways to onboard a customer. You can use an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template or publish a Managed Service offer to Azure Marketplace if you are an enrolled in the Microsoft Partner program.
- How to plan a Managed Service offer - https://aka.ms/ops118-Managed-Service-Lighthouse
- Onboard a customer to Azure Lighthouse - https://aka.ms/ops118-Lighthouse-Onboarding
For example, As an independent contractor, I can easily create an ARM template that will have the info necessary for the onboarding process, (Samples can be found here - https://aka.ms/ops118-Lighthouse-Github). You can send that template to your customer and they (after having reviewed the content) deploy it in their environment using PowerShell, Azure CLI or the portal.
Once it’s deployed you will show up in their environment as a service provider.
The idea here is that whether you are a service provider, an independent consultant or a customer in need of support. Azure Lighthouse is a solution that ticks all the boxed.
Check it out!
Azure Lighthouse documentation - https://aka.ms/ops118-Lighthouse
Azure Lighthouse in enterprise scenarios - https://aka.ms/ops118-Lighthouse-enterprise
Cheers!
Pierre