The future shines bright, like a lighthouse

Empired recently joined the exclusive list of Microsoft Azure Expert MSP partners and I could not be prouder of the team in achieving this. What made this achievement even more special is the fact that we did this without the use of a third party Cloud Management Platform (CMP). We made a strategic decision to leverage as many Microsoft Azure native features as possible to build our CMP as possible in order to give our customers an unprecedented level of efficiency, governance and automation, and fast access to updates as these become available, without having to invest in a third party product to achieve this

The team embraced the challenge and designed a CMP built on Azure Lighthouse as the foundation for multi-tenant management and control plane for all the other native Azure services we used to manage our customers. This was a bold design decision and we were challenged multiple times by different parties for not using established 3rd party CMP products, like all other Azure MS Expert partners have done before us.

Our decision was reaffirmed in our conversations with the Microsoft Azure and Lighthouse teams when we saw that new Azure features are released with Lighthouse support. The benefit of using a first party service and not having to rely on other vendors to develop, test and release support for new Azure services is a big advantage to us and our customers and also a big differentiator in using us because we have a supported service from day 1 of any new Azure service being released and can respond quicker than anyone else.

We backed our team because we have the advantage of the combination of Azure experts and developers to build the platform and integrate all the different Azure services. Using our internal expert skills played to our strengths as a Microsoft Gold Partner in 17 disciplines and showcased the Microsoft technologies we deploy for our customers every day.

It was very gratifying to receive the following feedback from Microsoft on our achievement of Azure Expert MSP: "Empired have shown their commitment and belief in Azure Lighthouse by making it the core component of their Content Management Platform. Empired and their customers can now directly benefit from greater efficiency, governance and automation without having to invest in a 3rd party product. It is fantastic to see how Empired integrated Azure Lighthouse into their managed services offerings and to see them achieve Azure Expert MSP status using only Microsoft and Azure native tooling.” Steve Belton, Senior Program Manager, Azure Engineering - Azure CXP Improvement

The platform covers all the areas the industry expects to see and we are already busy planning improvements to the platform to drive more value for our customers. It is exciting to see all the new Azure services come to market and be able to leverage these for our platform, providing these to our MSP customers without any delays and without the need to worry about a third party licencing cost.

I look forward to seeing the improvements we make to our CMP over the next 12 months and the new Azure features Microsoft will release for Lighthouse to support the service even more. The future certainly shines bright, like a lighthouse!

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