My 5 Favourite Things About Cloud Commander
By Paul Kelly
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles…OK, OK, OK, for any of you that read My Five Favourite Things to Automate blog know where I’m going with this, so I’ll save you the rest. Instead, let’s get stuck into what brings us here today: Cloud Commander.
Prior to its launch I worked with partners previewing the product, and seeing first-hand how it can have a significant impact on anyone responsible for managing Microsoft 365, Azure, and Intune environments. There are many things I love about Cloud Commander and as new features are released I’m sure this list will grow, but here are my current five favourite things about Cloud Commander. In no particular order.
Multi-tenant User Management
Anyone managing Microsoft 365 tenants today knows the number of tenants they are going to support is only going in one direction: Up. The ability to create, edit, and remove users from any tenant under your management while remaining in the same interface is huge time saver. Whether you need to create a user, reset a password, assign a license to a user, convert a former user’s account into a share mailbox, or reset MFA on a user’s account, these common helpdesk requests can all easily be performed when you log into Cloud Commander.
Oversight of Risky Users
One of the more recent additions to Cloud Commander, is the ability to see risky users. In this view you can see all users for the selected tenants, with those at risk highlighted. You also have the ability to filter on risk state and risk level, so you can prioritise taking the necessary actions to remediate the risks—whether that’s resetting the password or blocking the user. The multi-tenant approach helps ensures a user at risk—or even worse compromised—doesn’t go undetected.
Azure Resource Visibility
Over the past few years, not only have we seen a massive increase in SMBs migrating to Microsoft 365 but also more and more are moving their server infrastructure to the cloud as well. Having worked directly in the MSP industry for 16 years, I know that even when technology changes, customers still expect you to support it in the same manner you’ve always done. That’s why the Azure Resource Management of Cloud Commander is so important. Having the ability to see what resources are associated with a tenant, being able to drill into VMs to see their performance metrics, and to power cycle them when needed is key to helping ensure you can manage the cloud infrastructure in the same way as the customer’s on-premise infrastructure.
Intune Configuration and Compliance Policy Management
If you are managing Intune environments, those customers are relying on you to ensure you have the proper configuration and compliance policies in place. In most cases you’ll find you’ll run the same configuration and compliance polices across the majority of your tenants—every time you add a tenant to your management you have to configure these same polices. With Cloud Commander you can configure global polices across some are all of your tenants. This help you to standardise configurations, and makes it easier for you to modify configuration and compliance polices for all your tenants if you need to.
PowerBI-based Reporting
There are two key reports that are sure to make any tenant administrators life easier in Cloud Commander:
- The Microsoft Available Licenses Report allows you to easily see what licenses are available for each tenant and what proportion of them have been assigned.
- Microsoft Secure Score measures how secure an organization is—a higher score means they’ve taken more recommended security actions. The Secure Score Report lets you see and analyze these scores for one, some, or all of your managed clients in a single interface. It also helps you track security trends for your clients over time.
So, there you have it, my current five favourite things about Cloud Commander, but there is so much more to the product as well and at the rate this product is developing, and new enhancements are being made, I can easily see this list changing in weeks and months ahead.
If you want to learn more about Cloud Commander, then check out our Introduction to Cloud Commander Boot Camp or if you have questions join my colleague Joe Ferla in our Cloud and Tools Office Hours, details of all upcoming events can be found at www.n-able.com/events.
Paul Kelly is the Head Nerd at N‑able. You can follow him on Twitter at @HeadNerdPaul, LinkedIn and Reddit at u/Paul _Kelly. Alternatively you can email me direct.
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