Technology platform governance aims to enable business groups to focus on solving business problems efficiently while complying with IT and business compliance standards. This Power Platform Admin Essential Checklist outlines best practices to follow when establishing admin and governance for Microsoft Power Platform.
What sets Microsoft Power Platform apart from other low-code options already in use in your organisation (through Excel or Access) or other shadow IT, point-solution SaaS providers, is that everything is governed and authenticated through Microsoft Entra—you need to sign in with your work or school Microsoft Entra account in order to use this service. This means that as an admin, you have full visibility of everything your makers and users do—it can be governed, automated, audited, and managed.
Follow these three pillars of the Power Platform Admin Essential Checklist and click “Learn more” for more details on each.
Manage
Assigning Power Platform admins is essential for maintaining security, governance, and effective management of the platform, ultimately helping organizations maximize the benefits of Power Platform while minimizing potential risks.
User management in Power Platform involves various tasks and responsibilities to ensure that users have the appropriate access and permissions while maintaining security and compliance.
User management is a critical aspect of Power Platform administration, as it helps organizations maintain a secure, well-organized, and efficient environment while enabling users to leverage the platform’s capabilities effectively.
Establishing a license assignment strategy is important for optimizing costs, ensuring user adoption, and governance. The most common license assignment strategies include assigning licenses manually, bulk license assignment, group-based licensing, and by request (and approval).
A Power Platform environment strategy encompasses the planning and structuring of environments within the Power Platform ecosystem, defining their purpose, scope, and governance. It also includes guidelines for development, testing, and deployment processes to ensure a well-organized and controlled environment for creating, managing, and maintaining Power Platform solutions.
Dataverse for Teams is a low-code data platform that allows users to create custom apps, bots, and flows in Microsoft Teams using Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power Automate. When a team owner adds this capability to their team, a Microsoft Power Platform environment with a Dataverse for Teams database is created and linked to their team.
To manage Dataverse for Teams environments, you can use the Power Platform admin center.
Secure
Securing Power Platform with DLP policies protects sensitive data and ensures compliance with regulations, enhancing overall data security. It’s a crucial component of a robust security strategy.
Microsoft Entra ID Conditional Access can be used to enforce security policies based on user and device conditions, ensuring secure access to Azure and Microsoft 365 services. It helps protect against unauthorized access and strengthens identity and access management.
Cross-tenant isolation in Power Platform is used to separate and secure data and resources between different organizations or tenants, ensuring that they do not have unintended access to each other’s data or configurations. This is important for maintaining data privacy, compliance, and security when multiple organizations or departments are using Power Platform within a shared environment.
Monitor and Alert
To report on the resource usage in Power Platform, you can leverage the resource usage reports available in the Power Platform admin center. These reports provide insights into your organization’s usage of Power Apps and Power Automate, allowing you to govern and secure the platform, identify patterns, and nurture your makers to accelerate adoption
Power Apps and Power Automate activities can be tracked and viewed from the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. This allows tracking when apps or flows are created, edited, or deleted along with other key activities. These logs can be used manually for discovery and review and can also be accessed via API to automate more complex scenarios.
The Dataverse analytics in the Power Platform admin center will provide details on Dataverse usage in the selected environment. You can change environments by selecting Change filters and then selecting your environment. You can also adjust the date range. Only the past 28 days of data are available.
Templates in Power Automate are available to help you get notifications when new connectors are added:
- List new Microsoft flow connectors template
- Get a list of new Power Apps, flows, and connectors template
Configure those flows in your environment to receive regular notifications about new connectors.
Alerting can be used to inform admins and stakeholders about specific events, or provide a summary of activity.
Much like makers use Power Automate to automate their business processes, admins can use the tools for the same level of automation. An example of alerting that can be implemented is subscribing to Office 365 Security & Compliance audit logs.
The Microsoft Power Platform CoE Starter Kit is a collection of components and tools that are designed to help you get started with developing a strategy for adopting and supporting Microsoft Power Platform, with a focus on Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.
This is an essential admin checklist focuses on the main areas for setting up a Power Platform admin and governance foundation in your organization. Technomancy has the best experts to help you get things right. Please contact our team to discuss your particular challenge and find answers to your questions.