Managing Environments in Power Platform - Risk Management Part-2

If you're working with Power Platform environments, it's important to have a good understanding of how to control and manage them efficiently. Power Platform environments are where you can manage and share your business data, Dynamics 365, portal apps, Power Automate flows, chatbots, and connections. In this blog post, you'll learn some key considerations for managing environments in Power Platform / Dynamics 365 - Dataverse.

The scope of an environment is bound to a geo-location in the Azure AD tenant which can only be accessed by the users within the AD tenant. You can have multiple environments such as Dev/Test/Staging/Production, and each of them has its own Dataverse database. Additionally, you can move or migrate solution and data from one environment to another and the data is stored in the environment's geo-location data centers which is important when storing customer data.

There are different types of environments such as default environment, sandbox environment, production environment, trial environment, developer environment for personal development use, and Microsoft Dataverse for Teams environment. In terms of security access, users who want to access the environment need to be added to the Azure AD tenant, provisioned with a license, and assigned appropriate security roles.

For environments with a Dataverse database, there are different security roles available such as Environment Admin and Environment Maker. You can also use Azure AD groups to manage licensed users, app, and data access. The system backs up all environments except the trial environment and stores backups for different periods. You can also do manual backups but cannot download them. Backups are made using Azure SQL Database and you can only restore a backup to a non-production environment.

By following these best practices, you can ensure effective management of Power Platform environments, especially those with Dynamics 365 apps. If you have any questions or need more information, feel free to reach out to the author.

Author: @mihircrm

Blog: 365WithoutCode