Microsoft takes the decision to put the security of customers first before anything else

Microsoft has recently revealed its plans to change some of the elements of its Cloud platform in how customers are charged and how they can buy Microsoft Cloud products along with some interesting changes to better manage Partner access. 

You will find that Microsoft has been hard at work creating and rolling out its changes to its Delegated Partner Administration which essentially puts the customer in control of who can have access to your Microsoft Cloud Services within your Microsoft 365 tenant. 

This is an absolute gamechanger as previously you had the capability to either give full access or none at all to a partner. The significant downside to this was the fact that partners who had full admin access to your Microsoft 365 tenant but didn’t provide either support or Office 365/Dynamics 365 licences still had the capability to administrate these products/services. This is now being changed by Microsoft! 

Granted, Microsoft has always made it easy for many partners to gain access to the administrative centres, however following this change, partners will be able to ask for granular access for certain services. To give you an example of this in practice, Advantage could ask you for access to administer Dynamics 365 but not Microsoft 365 if we didn’t supply those services or licences. 

In addition to the above, Microsoft has also further added a time limit on how long a partner can request access for which is determined by the customer so it could be during the whole contract or just until a project has been completed.  

Worried about forgetting when admin rights are expiring or up for renewal? Don’t worry as part of this whole host of changes, Microsoft has added email notifications to inform you when this is about to happen. To help boost security further, Microsoft have added some improvements to the overall auditing capability. This is where Microsoft has enabled both the partner and customer to visibly audit the sign-in activity of partners into Customer Tenants. 

At this point in time, this is only available on certain Microsoft Cloud products, however the plan is to roll this out further which will allow you to take control of the admin rights and the duration of access. 

Next Steps? 

If you are a business that is looking to learn more about these new features or have an upcoming Microsoft Dynamics project that you would like to discuss further then please give our team of experts a call today. 

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