Glossary
What is Microsoft Power Platform?
Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of low-code tools that lets organizations build apps, automate workflows, analyze data, and deploy AI agents without heavy custom development. It includes Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Power Pages, and Copilot Studio, all built on top of a shared data store called Microsoft Dataverse.
Power Platform makes building fast. What it does not do well is govern what gets built. As adoption grows, so does the number of apps, flows, reports, and agents accessing enterprise data with limited oversight. That gap between creation speed and data governance is where most Power Platform challenges begin.
What Power Platform includes
Power Platform is not a single product. It is five tools that share a common data layer and work together as a platform.
Power Apps
Build custom business applications with drag-and-drop interfaces and low-code logic. Used for everything from simple forms to complex process apps.
Power BI
Create reports, dashboards, and analytics from data across multiple sources. The primary way most organizations visualize Dataverse data.
Power Automate
Automate repetitive workflows between systems. Triggers, actions, and conditions connect hundreds of services without writing code.
Power Pages
Build external-facing websites backed by Dataverse data. Used for customer portals, partner sites, and public data publishing.
Copilot Studio
Build and deploy AI agents that can answer questions, trigger actions, and interact with enterprise data through natural language.
Dataverse: the data backbone
Every Power Platform tool reads from and writes to Dataverse. It is a relational data store with built-in security roles, business rules, and a standard data model that Microsoft calls the Common Data Model.
Dataverse handles the basics well: row-level security, table permissions, and environment isolation. For a single app or a small deployment, this is often enough.
The problem surfaces at scale. When dozens of Power Apps, hundreds of Power Automate flows, and multiple Copilot agents all access the same Dataverse tables, the built-in controls start to show their limits. There is no single view of who is accessing what data, no way to enforce consistent business definitions across tools, and no audit trail that spans the full platform.
The governance gap in Power Platform
Power Platform solves the building problem. It does not solve the governing problem.
Inconsistent definitions
Each Power BI report, Power App, and Copilot agent defines "active customer" or "quarterly revenue" independently. No shared business logic layer exists across tools.
Fragmented access control
Dataverse security roles control table and row access. But they do not govern what data a Power Automate flow exports, what a Copilot agent can surface, or what a Power Pages site exposes.
No cross-tool audit trail
Each tool logs its own activity. There is no unified view of data access across Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Copilot Studio. Compliance teams cannot answer "who accessed this data?" without checking multiple systems.
How a governed data layer fits
The missing piece in Power Platform is a semantic data layer that sits between Dataverse and all the tools consuming its data. Instead of each app, flow, report, and AI agent accessing data directly and defining business logic independently, a governed layer captures those definitions once and enforces them everywhere.
This is the approach dhino takes. dhino sits between Dataverse and the consumers that need its data. Business users access governed data through Fetch. AI tools like Copilot connect through dhino Trust for deterministic answers. System-to-system data flows run through Integrate with full audit trails.
The result: same data, same definitions, same access controls, same audit trail, regardless of which Power Platform tool is consuming the data. Governance becomes a property of data access, not a policy that each tool owner has to implement independently.
See governed Power Platform data access
Learn how dhino adds a governed data layer to your Power Platform environment so every app, flow, report, and AI agent works from the same trusted data.