Microsoft 365 Lighthouse provides deployment insights across all tenants on a single pane of glass

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Microsoft 365 Lighthouse makes it easier than ever for Managed Service Providers to deliver managed services to small and medium-sized customers, at scale, with multi-tenant management capabilities that help them secure users, devices, apps, and data across all of their customers’ tenants! 

Lighthouse provides a comprehensive security baseline and helps you deploy it across your customers’ tenants – which is VERY cool – but what’s even cooler is the ability to see the deployment status of every task and every user across every tenant that you manage on a single pane of glass!

The power of deployment insights – a little something for everyone!

Previously, even with the comprehensive deployment capabilities of Lighthouse, you would have to look at each tenant, one-by-one, to understand their deployment status, review deployment exceptions, and figure out which tenants you should focus on at any given time. 

Bringing this information, from across every tenant, onto a single pane of glass delivers value for your entire team. For example: 

• If you’re an admin, you can use deployment insights to assign deployment activities across your team and audit deployment exceptions. 
• If you’re a service engineer, you can use deployment insights to quantify threats based on user- and task-level deployment progress so you can prioritize your deployment activities. 
• If you’re a customer success account manager, you can use deployment insights to plan customer success activities that reinforce the value of their deployed configurations. 
• If you’re in sales, you can use deployment insights to identify which tenants need additional licenses to complete their deployment plan. 

Whatever your role is in serving your customers, Lighthouse’s deployment insights will help you optimize your efforts and ensure your customers’ health, productivity, and security. 

Animation of Deployment Insights report

Reading deployment insights 

The deployment insights report allows you to “choose your own adventure” by helping you see the “forest” and the “trees” – and even to get down to into the “weeds” across all of your customers’ tenants. Intuitive filtering and sorting capabilities help you navigate and isolate key data that you can leverage to inform and facilitate your work. 

Deployment insights can be viewed by tenant or by task. For each tenant, you’ll be able to see: 

• Deployment progress by task and by user 
• Deployment exceptions like dismissed tasks and excluded users 
• Deployment tasks that have regressed from a compliant state 
• Licensing gaps that are preventing deployment 

Animation of Deployment Insights Tenant view
For each task, you’ll be able to see: 

• Tenant assignments 
• Deployment status across assigned tenants 

Animation of Deployment Insights Task view

Getting “into the weeds”

Having this breadth of information across your customers’ tenants is incredibly valuable but what makes it incredibly actionable, is the depth of information that deployment insights put at your fingertips, helping you get “into the weeds” with the ability to click into any tenant or task to see additional details.  

The goal of these insights isn’t to just tell you HOW your customers’ tenants are configured, but to tell you WHY they are configured the way that they are, and help you understand WHAT you can do to optimize your customers’ health, productivity, and security. 

For each tenant, you’ll be able to see: 

• Not just how many tasks are completed, but the deployment status of each task assigned to that tenant 
• Not just how many tasks have been dismissed, but which tasks have been dismissed and why 
• Not just how many users have been excluded, but which users have been excluded from which tasks 
• Not just how many tasks have regressed, but which tasks have regressed and the statuses that the task regressed from and to 
• Not just how many tasks the tenant is not licensed for, but which tasks require additional licenses for which users  

For each task, you’ll be able to see: 

• Deployment status by tenant 
• Deployment progress by user for each assigned tenant 

Animation of Deployment Insights details by tenant

Prioritize your deployment activities to maximize tenant security 

Deployment insights also accelerate your customers’ journey to zero-trust by helping you prioritize your work. For example, let’s look at three tenants that each have 10 deployment tasks assigned to their 100 users: 

• Tenant A shows that 0 out of 10 tasks are completed, with 99 out of 100 users complete, which would occur when there is one user for whom no tasks are compliant. 
• Tenant B shows that 9 out of 10 tasks are completed, with 0 out of 100 users complete, which would occur when there is one task for which no users are compliant. 
• Tenant C shows that 5 out of 10 tasks are completed, with 50 out of 100 users complete, which would occur when all users are compliant for 5 tasks but only half of those users are compliant for the rest of the tasks. 

By having two progress metrics, we can see that even though no tasks have been completed for Tenant A and no users are complete in Tenant B, Tenant C actually represents the biggest risk and the highest priority from a security perspective.  

Manage your risk by reviewing deployment exceptions 

Your Lighthouse will shine a light on any exceptions that have been made to the baseline across all customer environments.  

Lighthouse has powerful deployment capabilities that allow you to tailor baselines for each tenant that you manage which means that you need equally powerful reporting capabilities to help you audit and manage deployment exceptions as your tenant management strategies evolve. Every dismissed task and excluded user represent a potential threat vector and, while there are perfectly good reasons to make such exceptions, we’re excited that you’ll have the ability to effectively audit and manage them to mitigate risk for your customers – and yourselves. 

Deployment insights ultimately help you answer the fundamental question – “Are my customers as safe as I think they are?” and if you’re not happy with the answer, deployment insights will help you change it! 

Next Step 

If you already have Microsoft 365 Lighthouse, sign-in and check out the latest on what it has to offer at lighthouse.microsoft.com. If you don’t have it, Sign up for Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. 

Lastly, make sure to Follow or Subscribe to the Small and Medium Business Blog! As we have so much more to share about Microsoft 365 Lighthouse. Over the next few months, we will be diving into more details about the above areas plus sharing so much more on how Microsoft 365 Lighthouse can help you secure and manage your SMB customers at scale, while making them more productive.