Blog Why gaining insights into data and building apps with Microsoft’s Power Platform is 100% secure
By Insight Editor / 8 Nov 2022
By Insight Editor / 8 Nov 2022
Microsoft’s Power Platform offers a combination of powerful tools such as Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents. With its easy-to-use and low-code approach, people across the organisation can use the platform to gain insights into data and build applications that automate or streamline processes. If you are an IT security professional, this may sound like a real nightmare. Fortunately, the platform is extremely secure. Here’s why.
Developing apps, automating processes, working with data, and gaining insights with Microsoft’s Power Platform has great potential to make your business more cost-efficient and increase the productivity of your employees. But from an IT perspective, you obviously want put security first.
Still, because the platform has been developed with security in mind, you do not have to worry and can let your employees use it and build their own apps with confidence. The most important security layer is provided by the fact that people work in closed environments.
A Power Platform environment is a space where you store, manage and share your organisation’s business data, apps, flows, etc. You can compare it to a container that separates apps with different roles, security requirements, or target audiences. If your organisation allows people to build their own Power Apps, they will automatically work in these environments. Products that are really important to your business, such as R&D, are placed in separate environments. Not only are you able to fully secure them, you can also check audit logs and get a detailed view of what is happening in this space.
Managed Environments allow you to further refine these activities. It provides a range of options for administrators to manage the Power Platform at scale with more control, less effort and more insights. For example, you can limit how widely users can share canvas apps and exclude certain security groups. Weekly digests delivered to your mailbox keep you informed of what is happening thanks to analytics about your top apps, your most impactful makers and inactive resources you can clean up. Finally, you can easily define data policies that are applied to an environment. This ensures uniform management of data and prevents critical data from being accidentally published to connectors like social media.
To gain insights, people use and share data on the Power Platform. As mentioned above, you can add a data policy that ensures that sensitive data cannot be manipulated. This policy knows which data is business-critical and should not be shared with unauthorised users. Other data can be used freely. If you have top secret data that is stored in an SQL database, for example on R&D projects, you can completely block the SQL connector to protect the data. As a result, no one in a specific environment is able to use the connector.
To facilitate this process, it is best to group your environments according to their value and use. While a Human Resources environment will primarily contain HR apps and products, an R&D environment is more likely to have sensitive items that may or may not be used. If you have business connectors, you can also be sure that non-business connectors will not be able to connect. This provides an additional layer of security that allows people to build apps without having to worry about valuable R&D data.
Providing this security should not result in a lot of extra work for IT. If people have no access to a certain database, they automatically will not be able to use it in Power Apps. In other words, unless they are authorised to access the data, they cannot read, manipulate or delete it. This way, you can have peace of mind when using the platform’s capabilities and letting the business enjoy its benefits.
Insight’s experts also have best practices that will help you provide a secure experience. We are familiar with many different scenarios at customers in a variety of sectors. For example, we used Power Automate to help a company automate a guest management process. In the end, the customer was able to facilitate the process and achieve all objectives with minimal effort and maximum security. We also always challenge our customers’ demand to find the best solution for the expected result.
Do you have a question or want to learn more about the Power Platform’s capabilities for your company? Then feel free to send an email to our specialist: sofyan.boumadiani@insight.com
