Power Platform | We need to talk about Environments (again)

It actually has been a while I touched this topic on this blog site in a three parts series. Still though it has been present almost all time talking to customers, sharing best practices around Governance and Adoption. Therefore today, we need to talk about Power Platform environments again. Why? The platform obviously matured and many new features have been introduced over the course of time. Most recently, the engineering team introduced a new Maker welcome experience that could be configured by Admins when working with Managed Environmens. And talking about Managed Environment, this being another new option to simplify typical governance tasks for managing Power Platform.

You may have heard via the Message Center about the changes coming to Environment Maker and Basic user security roles turning to non-customizable (MC512527), or the latest announcement on EU Data Boundary fulfillment in terms of Power Apps service receiving responses from GraphQL (MC521430). You also may have recognized the changes to Power Apps Developer Plan as Developers were approaching yours asking for their personal „playground“. Establishing an environment strategy always has been one of the first tasks considering your journey with Power Platform. But it is also truth, an environment strategy should allow for change management and scale-out due to new requirements or purposes.

Think of the most recent AI-infused capabilities, by Azure OpenAI supporting chatGPT now. Makers starting to explore this new field by building next generation user experiences where AI assists in day-to-day job, taking over the easier repetitive tasks to have more time and focus on more complex ones.

IT Pros and Admins have been offered new tools to fulfill on their governance requirements. Above visual outlining the most popular used, while it should be mentioned that you can additionally extend or build your own governance via PowerShell cmdlets or the Power Platform-, Power Apps– and Power Automate Admin connectors.

With the options growing, re-thinking an environment strategy for many companies already started. Them considering to re-design their ideation & clearing process to ensure quality and compliance across all environments. For instance talking about deciding if developers should create their artifacts inside the default environment for personal productivity, or being routed to a personal- or shared development environment based on the artifacts to be created. Later-on deploying their solutions via Power Platform Pipelines to production. Fusion development teams broadly grow and scale, help onboarding Makers to ALM concepts in general, and finally Admins considering to configure Pipelines for an easier in-app experience for the majority of Makers. Still allowing co-using Azure DevOps with Power Platform Build Tools or GitHub and GitHub Actions for Power Platform.

Environments are the umbrella that spans reporting, alerting, management, security and governance tools for all these activities. Ensuring EU data boundary but also allow for specific use-cases. Think of a business unit that needs access to selected legacy systems via a build-in or custom connector. While end-users should be allowed to use this, you may want to deny access to those connectors for other Makers re-using data in an incompliant manner. With growing number of environments being available, IT Pro’s tend to raise „a white flag„, them stepping up with all the changes and features upcoming. Being swamped by new features and capabilities that Makers wants to „experiment or build“ with. On the other hand them being tasked to fulfill on license compliance, data security, EU-data boundary, local data security, company compliance or industry audit procedures. All this taking time and effort, while the CIO flags another time to comply with overall defined cost-saving goals and do anything needed during uncertain economic times. Sounds familiar?

Lucky yours, Power Platform got you covered for many of these standard tasks and can lower your effort while fulfilling on cost-savings. Forrester Total Economic Impact Study from August 2022 assessed an 81% improved IT governance. Furthermore, Microsoft recently allowed Power Apps Developer Plan environments to be enabled as Managed Environments and there´re many more features that comes for free with this license.

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard shared a survey via LinkedIn and Twitter asking IT Pros:

Where would you all prefer your makers to create their personal productivity resources?

Kenric (Ken) Auguillard via LinkedIn and Twitter

And those knowing that Microsoft keeps listening to customers may want to jump on this to see something added to the governance, security and adoption roadmap.

It´s about time to rethink your environment strategy, allow for an easy scale-out while maintaining control over the tenant in general and fulfill on your governance goals. A Power Platform Admin has become a full-time job and merging this role with being responsible for managing the M365 tenant has become a challenge. Gartner for instance recently was talking about

Orgs must juggle more change initiatives than ever before and employees want to co-pilot your change management efforts, not take a backseat.

Gartner, via Twitter

This topic joined by the key trends impacting security and risk management where #1 of them being more technologists now working outside of IT. What better way to describe what Power Platform Makers are mainly about. In case you want to read this Vision eBook.

Having shared this, don´t think of Power Platform governance from IT Pro´s perspective only. Think of the visual above on Open-Source change and allow a broader team (you could call it out a Power Platform Center of Excellence) to rethink on cost-savings introduced by an orchestrated platform for all your Makers. From a recent business value assessment performed with a customer that couldn´t believe them being presented a number of 72% of IT executives being unaware of number of „Shadow IT“ apps in their organization – the investment into Power Platform licenses versus running a complex audit process to regain control about apps floating around non-controlled by IT being by far less expensive. And if you think it´s the opposite – you may want to read this earlier blog around Shadow-IT.

If you need some more inspiration when starting your journey, I recommend listening to the episode from Low Code Approach podcast. Until then, happy listening…