Understanding Microsoft Power Platform and How It Modernizes Business

By 2025, Gartner predicts that nearly two-thirds of spending on application software will be directed toward cloud technologies. The advantages are clear: the integrated capabilities and automated work processes of these modern solutions deliver cost savings and drive efficiencies. If your business wants to keep pace, you must adopt these workplace technologies to modernize all facets of your business.  

Take Power Platform, Microsoft’s innovative set of applications that help organizations stay agile in this world of ever-changing business demands. If your organization has been hesitant to take the plunge to utilize Power Platform, fearing its low code/no code solutions put too much power in the hands of business end users, you are sacrificing valuable insights, efficiencies, and productivity, let alone a competitive edge.  

Here’s how you can take advantage of Power Platform services to drive your continued business modernization without losing control. 

Power Platform and Its Services 

Microsoft Power Platform is a low/no-code platform that spans Microsoft 365, Azure, Dynamics, and standalone apps. There are many tools within the platform, but the four most used applications are Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Virtual Agent.  

• Power BI is a business analytics tool that helps you analyze and visualize data in reports and dashboards. For example, you can use a Power BI dashboard to track sales data, comparing progress against goals or employee performance. These data-driven insights help drive more informed decision-making. 

• Power Automate enables process automation through workflows, allowing the problem owner to build their own solution. With these workflows, you can automate repetitive business processes in any scenario, from simple to advanced, and customize them to meet your business’s specific needs, boosting productivity.  

• Power Apps streamlines custom application development, enabling those with no software development experience to build low or no-code apps to solve their organization’s challenges.  This allows you to solve urgent business needs, reduce operating costs, or get rid of third-party solutions that only half meet your needs. 

• Power Virtual Agents allows you to build chatbots, manned by powerful AI, without coding. These bots can be incorporated into other Microsoft products and handle internal and external requests ranging from answers for common questions to complex queries, increasing agility and modernizing your processes.  

While powerful as independent solutions, each offering unique business value, when used together, the platform can have a bigger impact, improving operations and delivering end-to-end business solutions.  

Benefits of Leveraging Power Platform  

From the above descriptions of just a few of Power Platform’s services, the business value of the platform should be clear.  But it’s far more than just the sum of its part. Let’s talk about some of the benefits of leveraging Power Platform as a whole for your business.  

1. Scale without headcount 

We have all heard it or are perhaps the ones saying it: it’s time to do more with less. It’s no secret times are tough, and we all need to be more agile. Tools like those within Power Platform boost productivity by eliminating manual tasks, enabling your team to be more efficient and effective without additional time or resources.  

2. Empower your business users 

Typically, with any new technology investment comes a heavier reliance on IT to keep it maintained and functional. This not only burdens IT but can cost money to expand headcounts and reprioritization of other projects. With Power Platform, you don’t need to be a developer or even technically proficient to harness the power of data and automation. This not only benefits IT but also empowers business users to solve their own issues.   

3. Become more data-driven  

A Dell study found businesses are managing more than ten times the amount of data since 2016. With this rapid increase in data comes rising storage costs. If you aren’t using your data to its full potential, you’re wasting money. Power Platform doesn’t just deliver data reports, but provides you with analytics, allowing you to interact with the data, gain actionable insights, and translate them to impact. This puts your data to work, offering insights that help you make informed decisions and create new processes.   

We’ve barely scratched the surface of all the benefits of Power Platform, but the bottom line is this: the platform can save you time, money, and manpower.  

How to Manage and Govern Power Platform and Its Services  

If you’ve been in this game long enough, you’re probably starting to see some red flags. Like, how can you see who is making what and for what purpose, or how will I prevent app and flow sprawl if anyone can create anything? After all, when it’s easy to create things, users create a lot of things, often without proper controls or cleaning up after themselves. 

These are valid concerns, and many IT departments are grappling with how to align and guide citizen developers to centralize visibility, enforce policies, and prevent sprawl. However, it’s important not to let these fears prevent you from taking advantage of all that Power Platform has to offer. Those organizations that can mitigate risks of modernization through Power Platform can see a real business impact.  

By leveraging purpose-built tools like AvePoint EnPower, you can take full advantage of all that Power Platform has to offer without fears of sprawl, compliance issues, or shadow IT. AvePoint EnPower transforms how you manage and govern Power Platform with insights to understand trends, business context for every app and flow, and actionable monitoring capabilities, all while creating a complete lifecycle management process to help you maintain control of what users are creating and using. With its advanced management and governance, your red flags will turn to white when you give in to Power Platform’s benefits.

The Bottom Line  

Adopting any technology can be intimidating. Today, most of us can’t imagine life without Microsoft Teams, but if you think back just a few years, we were all a bit hesitant to take the plunge. There were too many unknowns and too many opportunities for admins to lose control. 

You may feel similarly about Microsoft’s Power Platform, but hopefully, this guide has quelled some of your fears. Innovative solutions like Power Platform are driving business modernization, which is necessary to keep up in today’s changing economic climate. Like any innovation, it isn’t without risk, but like any workplace technology, good management and governance practices can mitigate these hazards.  

Obviously, there is so much more to Power Platform than we’ve covered here – both good and bad – and as you deepen your usage of the platform, you will likely find new challenges. AvePoint is here to help you solve them.  

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