In today’s overly competitive and dynamic business landscape, organizations can leverage Power Platform's potential to build low-code solutions to improve productivity and efficiency and drive innovation and growth within the organization. To adopt Power Platform, you must develop environments where developers build, test, and use these low-code solutions.
As businesses increase their adoption of Power Platform, they must develop a good tenant environment strategy as the number of environments grows. If you are new to Power Platform, we will guide you in building your first environment strategy with the features available within Microsoft. We will discuss how new users can apply governance, security rules, and other tenant environment strategy aspects to bring productivity and efficiency to the table. We will also discuss how you can secure your default environment, which is the most critical step in the environment strategy implementation process.
What Do You Need to Know About Power Platform and Tenant Environments?
Microsoft Power Platform has four main components: Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents Now Copilot Studio. These tools allow users to create custom, business-centric, and flexible solutions to drive efficiency and productivity. They also help users process and analyze data, automate workflows, and build custom business-specific chatbots. Remember, you don’t need to be a coding expert to develop all these solutions. This low-code platform allows users to develop robust solutions within a low-code environment.
All four Power Platform components operate within a Microsoft 365 tenant environment. This environment takes care of user management, data management, security, and regulation compliance. Hence, developing a tenant environment is crucial for businesses to ensure secure, uninterrupted, and flawless operations.
Why Do You Require a Tenant Environment Strategy?
Users will work within a tenant environment to build low-code solutions. Hence, it is crucial to have a tenant environment strategy that is secure and robust.
Let's check out why you need a tenant environment strategy.
- Governance and Control: Developing a tenant environment strategy helps organizations ensure that Power Platform usage aligns with their operational policies, security standards, and compliance requirements.
- Optimized Performance: With a robust and properly configured environment, you can enhance the overall performance, scalability, and reliability of Power Platform solutions. This is crucial to gaining a competitive edge over others.
- Cost Management: Unplanned environment management might lead to increased licensing costs and poor resource utilization. On the other hand, a robust tenant environment strategy can save licensing costs and ensure proper resource utilization.
- Collaboration and Integration: A tenant environment helps businesses foster collaboration among team members and other stakeholders, such as business users, citizen developers, vendors, etc. It will lead to more controlled operations and high-quality solution development and deployment.
Key Steps to Develop a Tenant Environment Strategy
To develop a robust tenant environment strategy, you must determine your priorities, future goals, and the number of environments you want to develop. Let's check out some critical steps to build a tenant environment strategy.
Assessment and Planning
The first step is to conduct a thorough assessment of your existing IT infrastructure, organizational needs, security requirements, industrial or government regulations, etc.
For example, you can consider some specific use cases and business processes and how implementing Power Platform will benefit them. Furthermore, determining user roles is also crucial. Define the roles of employees who will use Power Platform, such as IT administrators, developers, business analysts, testers, salespeople, etc.
Finally, before implementing Power Platform, you must assess your security policies, data protection requirements, and regulatory compliance needs.
Environment Design and Configuration
Once your assessment is complete, you can design the tenant environments within Microsoft 365. There are various types of environments for Power Platform. We have discussed them here:
- Production Environment: You can go for the production environment if you want to deploy and run live applications and workflows.
- Development Environment: The development environment is for users who want to build and test applications and automate apps before moving to production.
- Test Environment: This environment is for testing software products, solutions, and updates.
- Sandboxes: These are isolated environments where users experiment and learn things without affecting production data and configurations.
Users must configure each environment with proper security settings, data access controls, and compliance measures. Microsoft facilitates users with various governance features, such as Data Loss Prevention (DLC), Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), etc., for security improvements and user permission management.
Lifecycle Management
Lifecycle management of Power Platform solutions across various environments is crucial, and transparent processes must be established to achieve it.
- Create workflows to develop, test, and validate apps and automation in non-production environments.
- Users must implement change management practices and approval workflows to deploy solutions to the production environment.
- Monitor performance metrics, user feedback, and security audits to ensure uninterrupted operations, adhere to regulatory compliance, and ensure data security.
Training & Support
You must train your employees to ensure quick user adoption and to adopt the Microsoft Power Platform with all the necessary skills. Many tutorials, videos, documentation, and other resources are available to foster a working culture of upskilling and continuous learning.
Review & Optimization
Keep reviewing your tenant environment strategy to identify and address areas of improvement, bottlenecks, limitations, and cost-saving opportunities. Monitor usage patterns, feedback, and evolving business needs and fine-tune your strategy to maximize the impact.
Tailoring a Tenant Environment Strategy for Your Organization
You must develop a tenant environment strategy that perfectly aligns with your organizational needs and business policies. Here is a list of tips to create a strategy that meets your business needs:
Evaluate Your Current Situation
First, evaluate your situation and assess your existing environments and what they are being used for. If you have a clear vision for governance, make sure that you tailor your strategy accordingly. Define your vision for how you will use Power Platform and who will use it to build low-code apps or other assets. Some questions that you must answer are:
- Are you planning to group your environments, and how?
- Define security levels for different environments.
- Will your app or Copilot use an existing environment or a new one? How will you decide it?
- Do you have any strategy to handle existing assets in the default environment?
- Do you have any pre-built tenant and environment DLP policy strategy? If yes, does it align with the new strategy you are creating?
Identify and Fill Gaps with The Platform
There are always some requirements that Power Platform’s built-in capabilities don’t address. You need to identify and evaluate these gaps to tailor your strategy. Some questions you might face while evaluating these gaps are:
- Is the gap acceptable for your business needs?
- Can you fill the gap using the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit?
- Can you fill the gap using the platform’s capabilities, like APIs, connectors, and custom apps?
- Do you require a third-party tool to fill the gap?
Once you answer all these questions, you will know how to tailor your tenant environment strategy.
Center of Excellence Starter Kit
You can get help from the Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit. It is a collection of various components, tools, and software that can help adopt Power Platform flawlessly. This kit allows users to collect data about platform usage across multiple environments to assist you in tailoring your environment strategy.
Conclusion
Power Platform can revolutionize the way you conduct your business operations. Powered by Microsoft, Power Platform tools can help businesses bring efficiency, productivity, and automation to the table. Not just that, companies can create low-code applications, get actionable insights from received data, and automate operations and processes. Developing a tenant environment strategy to adopt Power Platform is a primary requirement. With a robust strategy, businesses can leverage the potential of Power Platform to drive growth and ROI.
Ready to revolutionize your business with Power Platform?
Let's create a tailored tenant environment strategy together.
Contact us at DynaTech Systems today!
