A practice with three locations rarely has three IT problems. It has one problem, three times, with no single place to see it.
I've worked with medical groups that grew by acquisition — an office here, a merged practice there — and ended up with a separate Microsoft 365 environment for each one. On paper it looks tidy. In practice, nobody can answer the simple questions. Is multifactor authentication actually on for everyone, at every site? Did the front-desk hire who left in June lose access everywhere? Are the laptops at the satellite office encrypted?
The honest answer is usually "I'd have to log into each one and check." Three logins, three dashboards, three chances to miss something.
Microsoft built a tool for exactly this. Microsoft 365 Lighthouse gives your IT provider one view across every environment they manage — device compliance, risky sign-ins, who's still missing MFA, which sites have drifted from the standard setup. It's included for Microsoft partners at no extra cost. You shouldn't be paying extra for visibility you already own.
Why it matters in dollars: the gap nobody can see is the one that becomes a week of downtime at your busiest location, or a question on your cyber insurance renewal you can't answer honestly.
If you run more than one office, ask your IT provider what they can see across all of them on a single screen. The answer tells you a lot.
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