Scaling your enterprise cloud with Power Platform

Organizations around the world and across every major industry have used Power Platform since 2018. Its predecessor technologies have been widely adopted by enterprise organizations for far longer.

From 2013 to 2014, I had the privilege of architecting with one of Power Platform’s predecessor technologies - a data service called “XRM” - to build workloads managing electronic medical records, human resources, and air terminal operations for scientific missions to Antarctica. I’ll end the vignette with a terrible “dad joke”: It was a very cool project.

Thinking of more recent times, the last couple of years I have spent a lot of time with CIOs and other organizational + technical leaders who view Power Platform as an integral component of their enterprise cloud ecosystem, one of the connective threads woven throughout their particular patchwork of transformation initiatives. These types of Power Platform adoptions are nearly always related the organization's data platform, which is to say, Power Platform as the core operational or transactional layer - the orchestrator - connecting users to their data platform. To which end, below is a pretty typical executive vision or set of aspirations that I see these organization's achieving.

Notice how organizations that are achieving enterprise success with Power Platform are prioritizing the technology as a strategic asset, an integral part of their data platform, and a tool of cultural change... not just apps or a place for small-time productivity toys.

All of which is to say that Power Platform has been woven into the fabric of enterprise IT for far longer than most people realize, and, as such, is often the backbone of mission-critical “Tier 1” workloads. Some of my favorite examples on which I have worked personally (beyond the South Pole) include:

• Facilitation of $2 billion USD worth of business analysis, product development, and regulatory compliance at a Fortune 100 insurance firm;
• Modernization of end-to-end operational, human resources, logistics, regulatory, and IT capabilities at a highly secure public sector defense (military) agency;
• Tooling for a multi-billion-dollar industrial firm whose CIO and CFO steered away from point solutions, establishing single sources of truth for data, absorbing M&A activity, and building their future-ready cloud ecosystem;
• Helping an international law firm use Power Platform to reduce its security and compliance risk via better data security, modernizing a portfolio of applications, and extracting business intelligence from legal case data;
• Cloud transformation at a global humanitarian non-governmental organization (NGO) serving those impacted by conflict, climate change, and other disasters.

None of the above scenarios would have been possible, at the scale with which we achieved them, without Power Platform. Moreover, each relied on “premium” Power Platform capabilities, which is to say, capabilities that required paid, premium Power Platform licensing vs. the “basic” licenses that are seeded at no additional cost within many Microsoft 365 subscriptions.

You see, “basic” Power Platform was designed for simple workloads at small scale, primarily for personal productivity scenarios wherein a single individual or small team might build a simple Power App atop data they were keeping in a SharePoint list, or a simple flow in Power Automate to automate an otherwise tedious manual process.

These types of use cases are great for the individual or small team, but they don’t move the needle on the types of big enterprise challenges that have been the focus in most of my work with Power Platform.

With that in mind, readers of this article and those that will follow should assume that I am speaking of “premium” when discussing how Power Platform scales the enterprise cloud. None of what I’ll discuss in the weeks and months to come is possible at any sort of scale without these premium capabilities. Indeed, attempting to achieve these results with basic licenses alone will likely expose the organization to significant levels of data security and other risks and will often increase the long-run total cost of ownership to organizations that attempt to do so. This is a phenomenon that my friend and business partner, Mark Smith, calls “the fallacy of free”.

So, how does Power Platform actually scale your enterprise cloud? I’m not talking about a feature-by-feature comparison, here. You can find some version of that on the Power Platform website. No, I’m talking about big-ticket value; the reasons that all of the scenarios I described above came to rely on Power Platform at big scale.

• Use Power Platform with your enterprise data. Organizations quickly reach a point with basic where they find Power Platform isn’t particularly useful if it can’t work with enterprise data. Premium capabilities such as data connectors, Dataverse, data flows, virtual tables, and tight integration with Microsoft Fabric give you plenty of options. I can share a deep white paper on this.
• Lower your long-term costs. Research finds that Power Platform’s premium produce a 35% total development time savings, direct development and IT cost savings of $43.6m over three years in a composite organization, and offer a 224% ROI among many, many other findings.
• Secure and govern data to reduce your risk. You may not know it, but owners of large basic Power Platform estates sit on incredibly dangerous levels of risk: Risk for you, and risk for your customers. Premium Power Platform uses built-in and Azure-native tools like secure sensitive data through roles, data governance, and policies to which “basic” doesn’t come close.
• Infuse AI into daily work, then scale AI across your organization. Business users one-click query AI to discover and analyze data sitting inside of premium Power Platform, and even use Power Platform to build their own custom Copilots. More experienced developers know that data sitting in Power Platform is one hop away from lake-powered analytics and advanced AI models.
• Scale your cloud and other tech investments with hundreds of specialized capabilities. We’ve covered data connectivity and security above, but many organizations use premium Power Platform to scale with tools that enable externally facing websites and portals, snap-in AI components, risk-reducing application lifecycle management (ALM), advanced business logic, search, auditing, data validation, and much more.

I'll explore each of these ideas to more depth in the weeks and months ahead. We’ll begin with the last idea - that premium Power Platform allows organizations to scale their cloud and other technology investments with specialized capabilities - because that discussion sets us up nicely with a bit of background on what Power Platform is, what a platform actually is, and why that matters.

Join me.