As organizations embrace low-code tools like Microsoft Power Platform, governance becomes essential for maintaining control, security, and efficiency. Microsoft Power Platform, consisting of Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Power Pages, and Copilot Studio, is a low-code platform that enables users to automate processes, create applications, and visualize data with minimal coding skills. Power Platform is designed to empower business users to build solutions without involving IT.
Unfortunately, without proper governance, the powerful capabilities of low-code platforms often result in application sprawl, security vulnerabilities, and other inefficiencies, such as increased support, overhead, and abandoned solutions. This situation is exacerbated within Microsoft Power Platform as its initial state is essentially zero governance and many basic Office 365 licenses enable at least limited access to Power Platform. Thus, it is imperative for organizations to quickly develop a governance strategy around Power Platform consisting of the following elements.
Tenant and Environment Strategy
There are a variety of tenant settings that must be reviewed and managed. The default tenant settings tend to be the most permissive in terms of capabilities and thus should be reviewed carefully and certain features disabled as appropriate.
There are many kinds of environments within Power Platform such as Trial, Developer, Sandbox, and Production. In addition, there are managed and unmanaged environments. Finally, there is also the Default environment to which everyone has access. Locking down who can create environments and how environments are used within an organization is a critical governance issue that should be addressed earlier rather than later.
Policies
There are several different types of policies supported by Power Platform such as data policies, enterprise policies, and billing policies. The most important of these to address early are data policies. Data policies control which of the hundreds of data connectors supported by Power Platform are allowed in which environments. Data policies are a critical element in preventing accidental or intentional leakage of data.
Security and Licensing
Security and licensing are somewhat intermingled as different licenses provide access to different security features. And licensing is complex. In fact, the official Microsoft Power Platform Licensing Guide is 35 pages long. For Power Apps alone there are five different methods of licensing including use rights granted from Microsoft/Office 365 licenses, use rights granted from Dynamics 365 licenses, a usage meter licensing option, per app option, and per-user premium. It is therefore important to understand the various licensing options, what features are included with each option, and finally what security features are available.
Application Lifecycle
Just because Power Platform is low-code does not mean that proper application lifecycle management (ALM) principles should be abandoned. If anything, these ALM principles become even more important to an organization. Building efficient and effective ALM pipelines is critical to scaling the use of Power Platform within an organization.
Center of Excellence Starter Kit
Microsoft provides a Center of Excellence (COE) Starter Kit that provides an array of governance apps, templates, reports, and other tools that are critical to effectively governing Power Platform. However, this Starter Kit must be installed and configured to provide value to an organization. The COE Starter Kit is something that all organizations leveraging Power Platform should install as soon as possible in order to understand the current state of their environments as well as begin the process of tuning governance dials and implementing governance workflows.
In summary, governance in Microsoft Power Platform is critical for balancing innovation with control, and chaos vs. order. Governance empowers citizen developers while protecting the organization’s data, ensuring compliance with industry regulations, and promoting responsible, sustainable app development. As Power Platform continues to grow in popularity, implementing a strong governance framework is not just important – it’s an absolute necessity.
