Very recently, I sat in on a sales call where the customer was sort of kicking the tires on Power Platform. These calls are always fascinating because customer opinions about what Power Platform is (and isn’t) tend to vary quite a bit.

In this particular case, one of the IT directors on the call got to the point quickly and asked two very compelling questions:

“What’s special or unique about Power Platform?” Or, put a different way, “why should I listen to you when Salesforce or a host of other vendors will come in here tomorrow trying to sell me the same thing and saying that their product is in fact is superior to Power Platform?”

“How do I avoid all the shadow IT-related headaches associated with low-code solutions? We’re STILL recovering from the hell that was unleashed with Excel, Access, and SharePoint over the years.”

These are very legitimate questions — ones that I’m not sure the ecosystem always does a good job of answering. So, in this blog post, I thought I’d open up the Bowdark therapist booth and do my best to help long-suffering Microsoft customers answer these questions.

Topic #1: Why Power Platform?

When customers ask us why they should choose Power Platform over any of the other low-code application platforms (LCAPs) available within the marketplace, we always point to the fact that Power Platform is built on top of the Microsoft Cloud technology platform — see Figure 1 below.

This foundation layer is huge and something that Microsoft takes full advantage of throughout the entire suite of Power Platform solutions. Using a “no cliffs”-style philosophy, Microsoft has carefully built the Power Platform up in such a way that developers and makers alike always have an “escape hatch” to Azure or other cloud services to go the extra mile. Compared to other leaders/challengers, Microsoft is one-of-one in terms of their ability to draw upon this foundation to get the job done.

5 Key Differentiators with the Microsoft Power Platform

Although we can (and frequently do) delve into this topic in great detail, here are 5 key differentiators we point to when answering the question of “Why Power Platform?”:

• Enterprise-Grade: Many of the low-code services offered in Power Platform have pro-code cousins in Azure. For example, Power Automate is a cloud-based workflow and automation tool with origins in Azure Logic Apps. The point here is that Microsoft carefully built these services from the ground up to be enterprise-grade.
• Cloud-Native Design: If you look carefully underneath the hood at many of the services offered by competitors shown in Figure 2, you’ll find that the vendor grabbed an open-source project of some kind, added a few proprietary bells and whistles, and then added it to a Frankenstein’s monster-like low code services portfolio. One of these things is not like the other.
• Scalability: An added benefit of building on the Microsoft Cloud Platform is that it offers near infinite scaling and flexibility. With a global footprint and a vast network of data centers and advanced networking capabilities, Power Platform is not the kind of “throw away” LCAP that you eventually outgrow.
• Openness & Connectivity: These days, Power Platform comes with over 1,400 connectors out of the box. And, if you can’t find the connector you’re looking for, you can easily create your own connector using Open API and a little bit of pro-code magic in Azure. Like any LCAP, Power Platform plays very well with Microsoft-based products (e.g., Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, & Azure). But, unlike most of its competitors, it also plays equally well with non-Microsoft-based products.
• Time-to-Innovation: Microsoft’s R&D budget is off the charts, and you can really see it on display with all of the innovations you see continually introduced with the Power Platform. For example, consider the fact that ChatGPT basically came into prominence a year ago. Over the course of these past 12 months, Microsoft has unlocked crazy innovation on top of its OpenAI service in Azure, etc. to introduce Copilots and other AI-infused features and services within Power Platform. As other competitors are scrambling to sprinkle in some AI magic into their platforms, Microsoft is out in front leading the pack.

Topic #2: How Do We Protect Against Shadow IT with Power Platform?

For customers that have been burned over the years with SharePoint and Office, this is an understandable concern. And, unfortunately, Microsoft kind of poured gasoline on this situation by sort of just turning the Power Platform on for Microsoft 365 tenant accounts — enabling users of all types to sort of dabble with Power Platform to a point that made IT administrators very uncomfortable.

Lessons Learned from the Past

For customers that see history repeating itself in a bad way, the good news is that Microsoft has really learned a lot of lessons from previous missteps. In fact, I’ve been in a couple of sessions of late where Microsoft product owners have joked about their approach to governance and administration with Power Platform: think about whatever we did before with SharePoint and do the exact opposite.

All joking aside, Microsoft has put a LOT of thought into the governance, security, administration, and application lifecycle management (ALM) of Power Platform. For customers looking to put up guard rails with Power Platform, all the tools are there to define and enforce policies that ensure safe use of the platform from idea conception to post go-live support and beyond.

5 Ways to Promote Safe Use of the Power Platform

Although governance within Power Platform is a big topic, here are 5 ways that you can promote safe use of the Power Platform within your organization:

• Managed Environments: Everything that happens within Power Platform happens within an environment. Initially, this starts with a “Default” environment that’s not very well locked down. However, with some careful configuration, policies can be put into place to ensure that makers/developers are only allowed to work inside of centrally-managed Managed Environments. These Managed Environments can be locked down quite a bit in terms of licensing/resource utilization, security, coding standards, and so forth.
• CoE Starter Kit: This freely-available toolkit provides a host of tools and services to manage the Power Platform. This includes a robust innovation backlog app to keep track of app requests/ownership, services that capture telemetry and usage metrics, and reports and alerts to monitor tenant hygiene.
• Data Loss Prevention policies (DLPs): Related to the Managed Environments concept, DLPs provide a great way for customers to lock down access to systems or data sources they do/don’t want their makers to access. Although environmental strategies can vary greatly, these concepts could be used to build layered security policies. For example, new makers could be confined to sandbox-like environments that only provide access to common Microsoft 365 services like OneDrive, Teams, or SharePoint. Similarly, access to tier 1 business systems like SAP could be limited to pro-code developers that are granted access to a separate environment geared towards enterprise app development.
• Application Lifecycle Management (ALM): Using tools like the ALM Accelerator and Azure DevOps, it’s possible to put controls in place to make sure that Power Platform solutions are carefully tested and deployed using a robust approval process. When combined with a thoughtful environment/landscape strategy, these tools can be used to enforce crowd control and ensure that makers are not permitted to deploy half-baked solutions into production.
• Formalized IT Strategies: Each of the previous concepts we described can be combined with pre-existing IT processes around provisioning users/licenses, setting up managed service accounts (e.g., in Entra ID), defining centralized monitoring processes, and so forth. With built-in support for Azure, PowerShell CLIs, etc., it doesn’t take much work to fully standardize day-to-day operations within the Power Platform.

Collectively, these techniques/services can be mixed and matched to ensure that IT has full visibility (and control) over every Power Platform-based solution that gets introduced within the enterprise. In other words, no hidden Excel workbooks or Access databases.

Closing Thoughts

Hopefully this little therapy session provided some useful answers for customers that are on the fence about Power Platform adoption. As always, we encourage your feedback and questions.