By Lauren Brunson, Senior Technology Strategist, BitTitan

The sudden and large-scale shift to working from home has prompted managed service providers (MSPs) and IT service providers to quickly spin up tenants to make remote work possible for many companies and universities. In most cases, this rapid transition was done to meet an urgent need for a single group or division, and without a larger, company-wide cloud-enablement plan in place. For example, a parent organization may assign separate Microsoft 365 tenants its smaller subsidiary companies and have multiple tenants under one roof. Or a university my spin up a tenant for a single department or satellite campus that is separate from other departments and not incorporated into a singular tenant. In these cases of multi-tenant environments, there come numerous challenges. It's important to consider and understand the best practices for consolidation ahead of time.

While it makes sense that these tenants are spun up quickly to meet the sudden need to support remote work, due diligence must be done to streamline operations and support growth. Consolidating multi-tenant environments can offer numerous benefits that will ensure operations run smoothly long-term. Through consolidation, companies and universities can make their cloud solutions work more effectively, improve overall cost management, and enhance collaboration and engagement among their respective tenants.

How consolidation helps companies

The challenges posed by multi-tenant environments include increased expenses, security issues and difficulty with overall management. To start, end users may experience confusion regarding log-in information and application syncing. If logins aren't all synced within the platform, users will have to log in to several different places. Having multiple tenants within one organization can present communication hurdles that interfere with engagement between tenants. Multi-tenant environments can also make system management more difficult for IT teams. It poses more endpoints from which to pull data and can become a drain on resources with a greater need to manage each tenant's users, increasing IT costs.

A larger cloud enablement plan can help solve some of these issues as it provides more control of the environment and allows for company expansion later. A cloud enablement plan provides access to user data and offers report monitoring-the kinds of features you don't get from relying on on-prem servers. Further, an enablement plan helps companies adhere to compliance regulations, push cloud security updates and stay ahead of evolving changes to these rules. Implementing an enablement plan allows the IT department more control in shaping your company's future digital footprint.

Planning for consolidation

IT departments that want to consolidate their multi-tenant environments can follow several best practices to do so. First, they should create a checklist of tasks to execute when merging or consolidating clients to ensure the project is seamless. Things like the total number of users, if employees are in-office or remote, if the domain name will change, what data needs to be moved, and what data can be archived must be considered.

It is also important to make sure licenses are appropriately accounted for and applications are appropriately deployed to end users. This can help save costs and prevent you from paying for applications and software that may not be used day-to-day. For example, employees working in the field may not need Microsoft Teams for their day-to-day work, which should be factored into the plan. Your MSP can help you monitor usage of various applications over time, so that you can identify ways to save costs and choose the right applications for your workplace. Consolidating tenants also eliminates a need for a larger IT team to manage all of the different users under the separate tenants, which helps reduce management costs.

An increased demand for consolidating tenants

As the push to the cloud to enable remote work continues, there will be a corresponding increase in consolidating tenants through the rest of this year and into 2021. With this increase, we're seeing trends that will support the rising demand. The rollout of technology improvements from cloud providers like Microsoft will spur upgrades to cloud environments. Mergers and acquisitions will drive an increased need for consolidation as companies are purchased and join other companies. Additionally, markets that were once hesitant to move to the cloud are now embracing its technologies to maintain business continuity.

As the need for resources to support remote work increases, consolidating multi-tenant environments will only serve to benefit businesses, higher ed institutions and their end users. Consolidation leads to more efficient operations, optimized collaboration and engagement, and improved management of resources. Having a larger cloud-enablement plan will ensure your organization is operating as efficiently as possible, and that cloud services and technologies are fully leveraged to ensure continued success.

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About the Author

Lauren Brunson is a Senior Technology Strategist at BitTitan, where she works closely with sales managers to achieve new partner acquisitions and revenue growth. As a Certified Engineer, she helps people identity the best path to the cloud. Her areas of expertise include technical enablement, sales methodology and customer satisfaction, and she serves as BitTitan's resident Azure expert. Prior to BitTitan, Lauren worked as a sales engineer with AppRiver, a software company that specializes in cybersecurity, productivity and compliance solutions. Since 2011, Lauren has helped more than 5,000 companies move their business to the cloud.