Managing and securing multitenant Microsoft environments recently got easier for MSPs, thanks to a collaboration between Microsoft and two multitenant management platform vendors, Inforcer and Nerdio.
The initiative, dubbed #IntuneforMSPs, allows MSPs to automate and standardize tasks such as client onboarding, configuration, and security settings using the Microsoft Intune remote management tool—much the same way MSPs use RMM for endpoints. The collaboration brings Microsoft closer to SMB customers, setting the stage for further investment in Microsoft solutions such as Copilot.
Helping MSPs Manage at Scale
“The Microsoft stuff is fantastic but it was never built for MSPs and multitenant management,” says Ian Groves, managing partner at MSP Start Tech in Shrewsbury, U.K., which already uses Inforcer.
“Inforcer solved that problem by taking the Microsoft ecosystem, which is brilliant and used by everybody, and enabled me to use it on a multitenant layer so that as an MSP I can manage everybody at scale,” Groves says. Tasks that used to take days now require less than an hour to complete.
Such tasks were usually performed manually by high-salaried Microsoft-certified engineers, says Christian Nagele, Inforcer’s chief strategy officer. Automating them not only makes MSPs more efficient, but also saves them money.
Will Ominsky, vice president of MSP at Nerdio, says #IntuneforMSPs fills a major gap for MSPs.
“They really struggled with managing multiple customer environments efficiently with Microsoft. When you need to go manage a customer, you have to log in with credentials into that customer environment, do all your settings and set up, log out, and then log in to the next one and do the same thing. That can be a struggle for a managed service provider managing hundreds or thousands of tenants,” Ominsky says.
With Nerdio, MSPs create one set of standards and, with the press of a button, push them out to all customers, Ominsky says. The process is the same to update products, modify policies, and make other changes, saving MSPs 60% to 70% of the time it takes to complete tasks, he says.
A Path to AI
Nagele says #IntuneforMSPs helps with AI adoption. Inforcer, he says, can facilitate the journey for customers by first securing the tenant, and then securing and orchestrating the data. This sets the stage for implementing Copilot. “You cannot unleash Copilot or any other AI into a small business without first securing the data,” he says.
Customers are willing to spend money to catch the AI wave, and they are turning to MSPs for help, he says. “What MSPs are telling us in every interaction, every roundtable, and every dinner and every meeting is, ‘Help me take advantage of AI.’ We’ve got to solve as an industry how we help MSPs deliver that to scale,” Nagele says.
Ominsky says Intune enables MSPs to securely integrate AI into customer environments. “If you can build this foundation of security using policies from Microsoft, that ensures when you do integrate AI into an end customer that they are set up for successful AI adoption,” he says.
Adding New Business
Besides helping customers tune in to AI, #IntuneforMSPs creates new inroads into the SMB market for Microsoft’s high-value software, says Nagele. Inforcer has a relationship with the vendor’s product teams, and recently hired a Microsoft senior business development manager, Jason Ulacio, as its senior vice president of business development.
Inforcer, Nagele says, facilitates MSP access to products such as Purview and Defender for multitenant deployments. “It’s typically been very hard for MSPs to get access to Microsoft product teams.” he says.
Because of #IntuneforMSPs’ more efficient approach to managing solutions like Office, Teams, and Defender, Ominsky sees an opportunity for MSPs to maximize their investments in the Microsoft tech stack—as well as those of customers. MSPs, he says, sometimes pay for licenses for products such as Defender and don’t use them. Having a unified management approach helps them change that, he says.
Groves says solutions such as the Inforcer platform enable him as an MSP to consume more of the Microsoft stack. In addition, having Inforcer as an intermediary opens lines of communication between the vendor and MSPs that didn’t exist before.
“We feel as an MSP that nothing I could ever do could change the direction of Microsoft. We’re too far removed,” he says. “It’s perhaps one of the reasons we MSPs go to third-party stack solutions and don’t use so much of the Microsoft ecosystem. We can build a rapport with those other vendors but we can’t build a rapport with Microsoft. Through inforcer, hopefully we can start to build that.”
Image courtesy of Microsoft
