Light-touch governance for a rail operator's Power Platform

The challenge

Arc Infrastructure operates a rail freight network of more than five thousand kilometres across Western Australia, with a head office in Perth, several regional offices and over 400 employees.

Both employees and external providers were using Power Platform more and more. Environments were requested with no way to govern them, which led to background flows installed on personal user accounts, production deployments through unmanaged solutions, and connectors to personal or unapproved online services.

The manager responsible for Power Platform governance had significant Power Platform development experience but was not across governance best practice. He knew that people could develop unsafely, but not how best to stop it. A one-off review of the existing environments had found several areas of concern. Arc needed the ecosystem well secured and monitored, without adding undue governance overhead for end users.

Our approach

We recommended a best-practice approach aligned with Microsoft's maturity model and Centre of Excellence (CoE) guidance. We introduced Arc to the broader range of best practices, then focused on the key areas: a light touch on strategy and vision, and significant work on administration and governance.

We installed the Microsoft CoE starter kit, with reporting we developed on data loss prevention (DLP) policy and DevOps adherence, and a custom dashboard to bridge the gap between Arc's own requirements and the CoE feature set. We developed environment and DLP strategies to better support DevOps and data governance, demonstrated the pipeline technology options, and wrote full wiki documentation.

A preliminary audit report set out the actions needed to fully secure the ecosystem, and we presented the work to management.

The outcome

Arc has visibility and governance over its Power Platform ecosystem: a light governance experience for end users, with more environment security, monitoring and audit behind it to confirm the ecosystem stays adequately controlled.

The solution met all of Arc's current requirements for a spend of under $20K. Follow-up conversations found no need for further work yet, and Arc knows Interfuze is there when its Power Platform use grows.