Streamline the transition to Microsoft 365 with new Endpoint Management and Security connectors
The opportunity
Last week at Inspire, Microsoft reported on the rapid growth of Microsoft 365 and the significant revenue opportunity it offers for partners. In a session titled Helping our customers with Microsoft 365 and Teams, Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft shared that since M365 was introduced, three years ago, the opportunity for Partners has increased 2x – which averages about $55 per user/month. Some Partners even state they earn up to $200 per user/month.
The Challenge
However, to catch this wave many Partners will need to expand their current offerings to include more advanced security, compliance, and endpoint management services within Microsoft 365. This effort can be further complicated as Partners seek to support these services across multiple tenants and help equip their support team to address a new range of service requests.
“The competitive environment of selling Microsoft 365 requires differentiation. For us that means including Microsoft services that ensure the security our clients need across all the ways they work. But for us to be profitable in that venture, we need a centralized interface to effectively manage and support those services across our clients’ tenants.”
– Frank V., President & CEO, Gryphon Consulting
A Streamlined Approach
As part of SkyKick’s focus on empowering Partners with automation to scale their cloud businesses, we designed Cloud Manager to address the unique challenges of efficiently supporting customers across multiple tenants. Plus, with the recent release of connectors between Cloud Manager and the security, compliance, and endpoint management services in Microsoft 365, Partners now have a better streamlined approach to offering and supporting vital services to protect their customers and grow their Microsoft 365 practice – and profitability.
Microsoft portals are designed for single tenant management
Microsoft offers the following robust portals for managing security, compliance, and endpoints in Microsoft 365.
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Microsoft 365 Security Center (security.microsoft.com): This relatively new portal includes security-related management actions previously found at protection.microsoft.com, along with new features like the Security Score. |
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Microsoft 365 Compliance Center (Compliance.microsoft.com): This relatively new portal includes compliance-related management actions previously found at protection.microsoft.com, along with new features like the Compliance Score. |
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Microsoft Endpoint Manager Admin Center (Endpoint.microsoft.com): This admin center is the convergence of Intune and System Center Configuration Manager (ConfigMgr) and includes the Device Management Admin Center (DMAC) and Desktop Analytics. |
MSPs need multitenant management and support capabilities
While the Microsoft portals are useful for managing single tenants, they are not designed for MSPs to effectively monitor, manage, and report on multiple tenants or for frontline Help Desk workers to quickly navigate and easily perform specific actions in the context of service support.
“When it comes to our managed services customers, I’m struggling with how to position the Microsoft 365 offering. The challenge we face is not having a centralized interface for monitoring and managing all of the new security, compliance, and endpoint management services across the different portals for all customers – it’s a deal breaker for us.”
– Partner interviewed during research
Cloud Manager has been designed to resolve these MSP challenges, enabling Partners to more easily move into and scale Microsoft 365 services; from security and compliance to endpoint management.
More effectively manage Microsoft 365 security, compliance, and endpoint management across customers with Cloud Manager
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Multitenant Management: Cloud Manager provides secure, persistent connectivity across tenants and applications to enable partners to run single PowerShell commands across tenants and applications. |
For example, single commands can be run across customers to:
- Discover configuration anomalies or potential issues that may impact security or compliance
- Update settings or policies across all tenants upon the release of new features or to standardize security, compliance, or endpoint settings across customers
- Generate comprehensive reports to analyze current security and compliance status across customers or identify opportunities to improve or add to services
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Streamlined Automation Development: Cloud Manager streamlines the creation of PowerShell automation and simplifies standardization across security, compliance, and endpoint management. |
This is especially useful to help partners move from managing customers one by one across Microsoft portals to leveraging automation for more efficient standardization and management across customers.
Cloud Manager features:
- Thousands of built-in, PowerShell cmdlets that are:
- Pre-loaded to run in the SkyCommand Console (a PowerShell console pre-authenticated to all tenants) making it quick and easy to run ad-hoc commands from customer to customer or across customers
- Within the same interface as the Workbench editor IDE, making it easy incorporate into scripts via autocomplete.
- A centralized environment for engineers to create, share, and reuse scripts to accelerate the development and standardization of security, compliance, and endpoint automation.
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Empowered Frontline Help Desk: The Cloud Manager Workbench editor also features a web form generator that automatically converts parameters in PowerShell scripts into user-friendly form fields. This empowers the frontline Help Desk to resolve service requests (e.g. removing an email from quarantine) accurately, securely, and efficiently without having to authenticate, navigate portals, or follow checklists to manually perform support tasks. |
“One aspect of security that’s critical is consistency. We need to be able to implement the best standard configurations across multiple platforms or clients – and replicate it over and over… Microsoft requires a more elevated privilege to do this for our customers, so we can’t get the access we need without giving out credentials to our lower level resources.”
– Shane M., Bang/Present
Explore how Cloud Manager improves security, compliance, and endpoint management across customers
In just a couple of hours, you can be running sample scripts and start building your own automation in Cloud Manager. For details and instructions, see Test drive running and building automation for more effective security, compliance, and endpoint management across customers.
If you don’t yet have access to Cloud Manager, sign up for a free trial.