Enabling partners to deliver differentiated managed services

Partners are at the heart of incredible innovation stories on Azure, lighting up the path to success for our customers. Today, we are launching the general availability of Azure Lighthouse, capabilities for cross customer management at scale for partners to differentiate and benefit from greater efficiency and automation. Our partners who used this new capability early on are fans!

Together with Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, I’m extending our thanks to the Azure Expert MSP communities for their role in this journey with us on Azure Lighthouse. More than ever before, our customers count on our partners’ expertise in migrating mission-critical workloads to Azure, running scalable and dynamic applications and architecting modern apps with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Azure Lighthouse is part of our ongoing investment to empower the ecosystem with efficient tools, so partners can grow profitably as their customer base reaches new peaks. Over the past year, we’ve sailed the seas of product development together to do so.

Enabling higher automation across the lifecycle of managing customers (from patching to log analysis, policy, configuration, and compliance), Azure Lighthouse brings scale and precision together for service providers at no additional cost and that’s consistently for all licensing constructs customers might choose, including enterprise agreement (EA), cloud solution provider (CSP), and pay-as-you-go.

"DXC is excited to partner with Microsoft on the release of Microsoft Azure Lighthouse, which enhances DXC’s deep and broad portfolio of offerings on Microsoft Azure. With Azure Lighthouse, we get a single environment to manage across customers and their resources with higher automation and enhanced governance.”

- Dan Hushon, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, DXC Technology

Imagine monitoring virtual machine (VM) resource health across hundreds of customers in a single view inside Azure portal. Imagine creating, updating and resizing Azure resources of multiple customers with an API call, without having to cycle through multiple access tokens and identities. Imagine not having to switch context across customers to view all alerts from a single environment. It’s now possible with Azure Lighthouse!

Azure Lighthouse is powered by the Azure delegated resource management capability of Azure Resource Manager foundation. Through a logical projection of customer resources onto a service provider’s tenant context, it unlocks multiple customer, cross-tenant views and operations. Customers and partners decide on the precise scope of the projection, as well as the role-based access desired. Check out Azure Chief Technology Officer Mark Russinovich’s blog for a deep under-the-hood view.

“Azure Lighthouse fits perfectly into our strategy as it allows us to securely manage Azure resources at scale and deliver automation via programmatic options such as ARM templates and APIs.”

- Stanislav Zhelyazkov, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Sentia

Azure Lighthouse capabilities come alive both natively and also through API integration into partner cloud management portals or partner applications such as monitoring and IT service management. This partner-to-partner collaboration is unique to Microsoft’s partner ecosystem.

“Azure Lighthouse will change the way we manage our customers’ Azure resources. With this set of capabilities, we will be able to manage all subscriptions with centralized monitoring, alerting, compliance, and security from a single portal.”

- Wesley Haakman, Lead Azure Architect, Intercept

Additionally, service providers can seamlessly onboard new customers via public or private managed services offers on Azure marketplace or using Azure Resource Manager templates. With a repository of extensibility and automation templates on GitHub, partners have options with Azure Lighthouse. Thanks to a built-in activation of Partner Admin Link, managed services partners using Azure Lighthouse can seamlessly participate in partner rewards and incentives.

At this next frontier of cloud growth, partners will continue to be key to customer success. Our focus at Azure to enable customer and partner joint success will continue, as passionately as ever. We look forward to hearing about the experiences in using Azure Lighthouse—please be in touch.

Learn more at azure.com/lighthouse.

Additional resources

Azure Lighthouse Documentation

GitHub repository