Environment strategy

The Power Platform environment has evolved significantly over time. New features and capabilities have emerged and as these capabilities become more prevalent, the need for a smart environment strategy becomes even more important.

Here's a roadmap to consider when developing an environment strategy:

Role Assignments:
Allocate Power Platform service admin roles to dedicated administrators for optimal management.

Controlled Environment Creation:
Limit the creation of production environments to administrators, preventing unauthorized sprawl.

Default Environment Purpose:
Clearly define and communicate the default environment's purpose, utilizing it for user and team productivity rather than mission-critical apps.

Environment Creation request:
Establish a formal process for requesting new environments, fostering collaboration between developers and administrators.

Tiered Environments:
Create dedicated development, test, and production environments for critical projects, ensuring data integrity.

Individual-Use Environments:
Generate separate environments for proof of concepts and workshops, promoting organization and resource management.

DLP Policies:
Implement robust DLP policies at both tenant and environment levels, safeguarding organizational data.

Shared Environments: Create shared environments to facilitate integration, onboarding, and resource conservation.

Governance is an essential topic of Power Platform environment management

The platform offers a range of tools to meet governance requirements, such as:

PowerShell cmdlets

...and Power Automate admin connectors.

Additional recommendations for managing environments

• Utilize a service account for deploying production solutions, in order to improve control and resource management.

• Implement automation for environment creation, ensuring efficient provisioning and capacity utilization.

• Set deadlines for temporary development environments to avoid clutter and optimize resource allocation.

• Implementing Power Platform Pipelines for deployment of solutions to production environment and for improvement of governance capabilities.

Communicating your organization's strategy

Make sure your organization's strategy for environments is easy to understand by the makers. You can do this by setting up a special place like a SharePoint site. In this place, you can explain:

• The purpose of the default environment.
• How to ask for access to these places.
• How to get one.
• Why developer environments are needed and how to make them.
• How to ask for special environments just for certain business teams or projects.

If you're a maker, remember:

• If you're done with an environment, apps, or flows, get rid of them.
• Use test spaces if you want to try something out.
• Be careful about sharing too much. Don't share too many environments, apps, flows, or connections.
• Keep important organization data safe. Don't move it to places that aren't safe or outside of the organization.

Conclusion

Managing your Power Platform environments smartly is like a key to making awesome apps, keeping data safe, and getting things done faster. When you plan things well, you use resources better and help developers and administrators work together.