Stop Building Apps, Start Engineering Control Planes

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Most organizations think more apps means more productivity.

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They're wrong.

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More apps means more governance surface area.

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More connectors, more owners, more permissions,

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more places for data to leak,

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and more tickets when something breaks.

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The thesis is simple.

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Governance by humans doesn't scale.

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Control plane scale trust.

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Today, this is a single operating model shift

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from building apps to engineering control planes

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that reliably cuts governance-related support tickets

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by around 40%.

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If that's the kind of thinking you want, subscribe.

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This channel does control, not crafts.

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Now to the autopsy.

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The foundational misunderstanding.

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An app is the solution.

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The foundational misunderstanding is that an app is the solution.

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It is not.

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An app is the user interface veneer

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over a chain of identity decisions,

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connector pathways, environment boundaries,

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and life cycle events.

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And the weird part is,

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the most expensive parts of that chain

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aren't visible in the Maker Studio.

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They show up later in audit evidence requests,

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incident bridges, and the support queue nobody can empty.

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Here's why this misunderstanding persists.

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App first incentives reward shipping something that works once.

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For a single team under a single owner

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in a single moment of organizational stability.

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The moment you demo it, it's done.

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The moment you release it, the organization treats it

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like infrastructure.

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But the build model doesn't treat it like infrastructure.

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It treats it like a document editable forever,

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shared loosely, and dependent on tribal knowledge

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to stay alive.

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That distinction matters.

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Because governance and risk don't live inside the app canvas,

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they live in the control plane.

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Entroprinciples, conditional access evaluation,

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connector permissions, DLP boundaries, environment strategy,

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and the inventory that tells you what exists.

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When you build apps without engineering that layer,

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you're not delivering productivity,

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you're exporting responsibility into the future.

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And executives are knowingly fund this.

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They think they bought a workflow.

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What they actually funded is a new branch in the authorization

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graph with connectors that create data pathways

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with owners that can leave the company

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with credentials that expire

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and with policies that will drift,

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because nobody wired the drift detection.

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That's not cynical.

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That's the platform behaving exactly as designed.

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Now, the part architects keep missing app first governance

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turns deterministic systems into probabilistic ones.

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A deterministic security model says,

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these identities can access these resources under these conditions.

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And that statement stays true tomorrow.

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A probabilistic model says it depends on which exception

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applies, which connector got added,

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which environment a maker used, which label got applied,

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and whether the owner is still employed.

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Over time, exceptions multiply outcomes.

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The organization becomes unable to predict

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what will happen when a user clicks, run.

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Conditional access is a great example,

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because it's literally a policy engine

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that evaluates signals and applies controls.

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But it's additive, policy stack, exclusion stack, overlap stack.

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People don't build a single coherent policy set.

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They build a pile of fixes.

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And that pile becomes what many practitioners call conditional chaos,

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not because conditional access is bad,

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but because humans use it as a patch panel instead of a compiler.

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So when someone says, we'll govern it with an approval board,

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what they're actually saying is,

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we'll turn system behavior into meeting behavior.

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Manual review cues become the throughput limiter.

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Every exception approved becomes precedent,

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and then the board is no longer enforcing policy.

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It's negotiating entropy.

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This gets worse with co-pilot and agents

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because the number of runtime decisions explodes.

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A classic app does what you programmed.

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An agent does what you allowed based on a prompt grounded in data,

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using tools in a context that changes per request.

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That doesn't make agents evil.

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It makes them probabilistic.

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And probabilistic systems demand control planes,

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not best effort documentation.

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Microsoft's own ecosystem already assumes control planes exist.

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Enter is a distributed decision engine.

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Microsoft Graph is the unified plumbing for life cycle

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and configuration at scale.

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Per view, DLP is a policy enforcement layer.

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Power platform admin features exist specifically

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because app first doesn't scale.

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But in most tenants, those are treated as optional admin chores.

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The organization ships apps then asks admins to clean up later

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that is architectural time travel.

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You can't retroactively add determinism

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to a system that already shipped a thousand unique variations.

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Here's a simple operational test.

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Ask.

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If the original maker quits today,

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can this app be safely maintained,

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audited and retired without heroics?

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If the answer is no, you didn't build a solution.

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You built a hostage situation with a nice UI.

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Control planes fix this by moving decisions upstream.

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They don't make makers slower.

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They remove the need for humans to be the policy enforcement mechanism.

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They convert governance from review into design, identity,

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provisioning and DLP become default rails,

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not after the fact policing.

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And yes, that feels like an operating model shift because it is.

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You stop counting apps.

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You start engineering the system that creates apps safely,

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consistently and with an end of life by default.

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Now that the disease is defined,

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the next step is uncomfortable.

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Look at your app estate, the way an incident responder would,

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not the way a maker would.

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Apps for autopsy, symptoms you can't ignore.

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Apps Brawl isn't a vibe, it's observable system behavior.

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And it shows up the same way in almost every tenant

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that scaled power platform in M365.

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Without an engineered operating model,

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the estate grows faster than the organization's ability to explain it.

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Not govern it, explain it.

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The first symptom is the 3000 plus app pattern.

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The number doesn't matter, the shape does.

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Once you cross a certain threshold,

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nobody can answer basic questions without an excavation.

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What does this app do?

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Who depends on it?

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What data does it touch?

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And what breaks if it disappears?

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At small scale, you can fake that answer with tribal knowledge.

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At enterprise scale, tribal knowledge becomes a single point of failure

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with a resignation letter.

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So the estate becomes a museum of half finished ideas.

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Temporary apps that became permanent.

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Pilot flows that now run payroll adjacent logic

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and approvals built by someone who moved on two reorganizations ago.

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Everything still works until it doesn't, that's the trick.

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Sproul stays quiet right up until the day it becomes your incident.

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The second symptom is orphaned ownership.

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This is the most boring, most lethal failure mode in low-code environments.

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Makers leave, contractors rotate, people change roles.

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The app and flow don't leave with them.

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The ownership does.

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And then simple maintenance actions,

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updating a broken connection, changing a variable,

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rotating a secret, fixing a connector deprecation,

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suddenly require admin intervention

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because nobody has the rights to touch the thing that runs a business process.

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In unmanaged estates, this is where admins become human control planes.

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They don't design the system, they patch the outcomes.

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They get pulled into every broken flow, every failed connection,

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every, can you just hear a request that should have been an automated life cycle rule.

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Over time, support turns into archaeology,

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digging through dead assets to find the one piece of logic that still matters.

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The third symptom is default environment gravity.

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The default environment is supposed to be a convenience.

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In practice, it becomes a landfill because it has the lowest friction

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and the least accountability.

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Makers build there because it's available.

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Teams share there because it's easy.

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And the moment something in the default environment delivers value,

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it becomes politically difficult to move because moving implies admitting it was production all along.

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So the default environment becomes a production environment that nobody is allowed to call production.

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That's not just messy.

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It breaks every governance assumption you think you have.

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Environment boundaries, DLP segmentation, solution life cycle,

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and basic separation between exploration and regulated workloads.

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The fourth symptom is connector creep.

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Every connector is a data pathway.

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That means every connector is also a policy obligation.

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Logging, review, data classification,

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and in some cases licensing and vendor risk.

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But in app first cultures, connectors don't feel like pathways.

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They feel like buttons.

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So they accumulate quietly.

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One flow uses a consumer connector for convenience.

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Another app uses a premium connector because it was faster.

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And suddenly sensitive data has multiple exits you didn't design.

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The platform didn't betray you.

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It did exactly what you configured.

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You just didn't treat connectors as part of the architecture.

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And when DLP feels inconsistent, it's usually not because DLP is random.

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It's because your environment strategy is random.

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Tenant-wide policy meets environment level exceptions,

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meets temporary maker sandboxes that turned into operational dependencies.

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The enforcement looks inconsistent because the estate is inconsistent.

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The fifth symptom is that support tickets become the leading indicator.

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Not because support is incompetent, because tickets measure friction,

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they measure ambiguity, they measure missing ownership, missing inventory,

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and missing boundaries.

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A governance related ticket is rarely the app is broken.

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It's who owns this? Why can't I access that?

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This connector stopped working.

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DLP blocked my flow.

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The environment is full.

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The service principle expired.

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The approval is stuck.

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Copilot did something we can't explain.

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Tickets are the ten and telling you the control plane is missing.

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Here's the uncomfortable autopsy conclusion.

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Apps Brawl isn't caused by too many makers.

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It's caused by too few enforced assumptions.

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When governance depends on humans reviewing outputs,

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the system scales by creating more outputs.

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Therefore, the organization hires more reviewers.

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That's not governance.

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That's an entropy payroll.

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The next step is to stop treating these symptoms as separate problems.

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They share a single root cause.

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Governance that depends on human review as the enforcement mechanism.

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Root cause governance that depends on human review.

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The root cause behind apps Brawl isn't that people build too much.

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It's that the tenant's safety model depends on humans catching mistakes after the fact.

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That model always collapses, because human review is the slowest component in the system,

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and in distributed systems, the slowest component defines throughput.

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Not the best intentions, not the policy document, throughput.

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So the organization creates a queue, a board, a mailbox, a form, a process.

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Then every new app, flow, connector request, environment request, and DLP exception

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becomes an item in that queue.

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The makers don't stop building.

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They just keep building until they hit the queue.

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And once they hit the queue, they do what humans always do when constrained by a bottleneck.

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They root around it.

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They build in the default environment.

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They reuse someone else's connection.

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They temporarily use a personal connector.

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They ship without review because the business deadline is real and the governance deadline

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is a suggestion.

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This is the uncomfortable truth.

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Governance that requires a review step trains the organization to avoid governance, because

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the system rewards output, not operability.

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Now this is where approval boards become entropy generators.

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On day one, the board exists to protect the tenant.

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On day 90, the board exists to keep the business from yelling at IT.

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The board starts approving exceptions just this once, because the request sounds reasonable

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in isolation.

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But exceptions don't stay isolated.

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They accumulate, they get copied, they become how we do it here.

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And suddenly the board isn't enforcing policy.

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It's manufacturing precedent.

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That distinction matters.

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A policy is supposed to be a deterministic constraint, and exception is a fork in the security

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model.

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Enough forks and the tenant becomes a probabilistic system where outcomes depend on which

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historical work around someone remembers to use.

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And then comes the most common lie, just documented.

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Documentation is not a control.

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It never was.

264
00:10:26,960 --> 00:10:31,040
Documentation is an explanation of intent, written at a point in time by someone who had

265
00:10:31,040 --> 00:10:32,800
context that the next person won't.

266
00:10:32,800 --> 00:10:34,400
It decays faster than app's ship.

267
00:10:34,400 --> 00:10:36,480
It becomes stale the moment a connector is added.

268
00:10:36,480 --> 00:10:40,760
An owner changes, a label taxonomy evolves, or Microsoft updates the platform behavior.

269
00:10:40,760 --> 00:10:42,040
The result is predictable.

270
00:10:42,040 --> 00:10:43,560
The document becomes theater.

271
00:10:43,560 --> 00:10:46,600
It exists to satisfy a meeting not to enforce a boundary.

272
00:10:46,600 --> 00:10:48,760
Auditors don't ask whether you have documentation.

273
00:10:48,760 --> 00:10:50,960
They ask whether you can produce evidence.

274
00:10:50,960 --> 00:10:54,400
Evidence is inventory, logs, ownership, and policy outcomes.

275
00:10:54,400 --> 00:10:56,960
Not a conference page with a diagram from last year.

276
00:10:56,960 --> 00:10:59,480
This failure is amplified by fragmented authority.

277
00:10:59,480 --> 00:11:01,560
IT owns risk.

278
00:11:01,560 --> 00:11:03,160
Business owns outcomes.

279
00:11:03,160 --> 00:11:04,800
Security owns policy.

280
00:11:04,800 --> 00:11:06,120
Compliance owns penalties.

281
00:11:06,120 --> 00:11:08,080
The maker owns the thing until they don't.

282
00:11:08,080 --> 00:11:10,480
No one owns drift and drift is the actual enemy.

283
00:11:10,480 --> 00:11:12,120
Drift means our back membership changes.

284
00:11:12,120 --> 00:11:16,480
It means service principles get created with broad permissions temporarily.

285
00:11:16,480 --> 00:11:21,040
It means environments proliferate because environment creation is easier than cleanup.

286
00:11:21,040 --> 00:11:25,360
It means DLP policies get tweaked per exception until enforcement becomes inconsistent across

287
00:11:25,360 --> 00:11:26,880
zones where nobody owns drift.

288
00:11:26,880 --> 00:11:29,440
Governance turns into a reactive service desk.

289
00:11:29,440 --> 00:11:32,720
And that service desk becomes the de facto control plane.

290
00:11:32,720 --> 00:11:36,960
Humans manually correcting a system that never encoded the intent in the first place.

291
00:11:36,960 --> 00:11:38,920
Here's the simple system law.

292
00:11:38,920 --> 00:11:44,120
If a governance decision can't be enforced automatically, repeatedly, and consistently,

293
00:11:44,120 --> 00:11:45,120
it's not governance.

294
00:11:45,120 --> 00:11:49,640
It's a request for someone's attention and attention doesn't scale.

295
00:11:49,640 --> 00:11:52,640
At enterprise size, the demand for attention grows faster than headcount.

296
00:11:52,640 --> 00:11:54,840
Therefore, the review model creates chronic backlog.

297
00:11:54,840 --> 00:11:59,520
Backlog creates workarounds, workarounds creates security debt, security debt creates incidents,

298
00:11:59,520 --> 00:12:01,000
and incidents create more review.

299
00:12:01,000 --> 00:12:03,440
It's a closed loop, a bad one.

300
00:12:03,440 --> 00:12:07,080
This is also why AI makes the human review model collapse faster.

301
00:12:07,080 --> 00:12:10,120
Agents and co-pilots don't just increase the number of apps.

302
00:12:10,120 --> 00:12:13,240
They increase the number of principles, tool calls, and data pathways.

303
00:12:13,240 --> 00:12:14,920
They create more decisions at runtime.

304
00:12:14,920 --> 00:12:17,760
If your control strategy is, we'll review it.

305
00:12:17,760 --> 00:12:21,840
You are volunteering to review an infinite stream of probabilistic behavior.

306
00:12:21,840 --> 00:12:22,840
You won't.

307
00:12:22,840 --> 00:12:23,960
So the goal isn't more governance.

308
00:12:23,960 --> 00:12:27,880
The goal is governance that doesn't require asking permission for every action.

309
00:12:27,880 --> 00:12:32,840
You move enforcement upstream, identity policy, provisioning gates, and DLP boundaries that

310
00:12:32,840 --> 00:12:38,080
exist at creation time, not incident time, because the only scalable review board is code.

311
00:12:38,080 --> 00:12:41,160
The hidden bill support ordered an incident economics.

312
00:12:41,160 --> 00:12:44,520
Now comes the part nobody budgets for because it doesn't look like a project.

313
00:12:44,520 --> 00:12:46,440
It looks like operations.

314
00:12:46,440 --> 00:12:50,880
An operation in most orgs is treated like weather, inconvenient, inevitable, and somehow

315
00:12:50,880 --> 00:12:53,320
not caused by design decisions.

316
00:12:53,320 --> 00:12:55,080
At first the states don't just create risk.

317
00:12:55,080 --> 00:12:58,640
They create recurring invoices paid in time, attention, and downtime.

318
00:12:58,640 --> 00:13:02,680
The hidden bill is what happens after the demo when the organization starts living inside

319
00:13:02,680 --> 00:13:03,880
the thing you shipped.

320
00:13:03,880 --> 00:13:05,280
Start with support.

321
00:13:05,280 --> 00:13:06,760
Support tickets are not random noise.

322
00:13:06,760 --> 00:13:07,760
There are cost models.

323
00:13:07,760 --> 00:13:10,480
Every ticket is a micropayment for ambiguity.

324
00:13:10,480 --> 00:13:14,920
Missing ownership, unclear permissions, broken connections, expired credentials, who has

325
00:13:14,920 --> 00:13:15,920
access?

326
00:13:15,920 --> 00:13:16,920
Why is this blocked?

327
00:13:16,920 --> 00:13:18,360
Why did this flow stop?

328
00:13:18,360 --> 00:13:20,240
What environment is this even in?

329
00:13:20,240 --> 00:13:21,960
And tickets compound?

330
00:13:21,960 --> 00:13:23,480
Unbroken connection isn't one ticket.

331
00:13:23,480 --> 00:13:24,480
It's a chain.

332
00:13:24,480 --> 00:13:28,240
User reports failure, help desk triages, admin escalates.

333
00:13:28,240 --> 00:13:32,520
Security asks whether data leaked, compliance asks whether the app is in scope, and the maker,

334
00:13:32,520 --> 00:13:35,560
if they still exist, says it worked yesterday.

335
00:13:35,560 --> 00:13:39,720
That entire chain exists because the system didn't produce an authoritative answer by default.

336
00:13:39,720 --> 00:13:44,080
If you want an executive translation, apps crawl converts governance into a subscription.

337
00:13:44,080 --> 00:13:46,880
You pay every month, forever.

338
00:13:46,880 --> 00:13:50,600
Next, audit economics.

339
00:13:50,600 --> 00:13:53,520
This don't care that you have a governance process.

340
00:13:53,520 --> 00:13:57,200
They care whether you can prove control and proof is expensive when it's manual.

341
00:13:57,200 --> 00:14:01,440
Evidence production becomes its own shadow project, inventory exports, screenshots, exception

342
00:14:01,440 --> 00:14:06,400
lists, DLP policies, environment lists, connector usage, ownership lists, access reviews, incident

343
00:14:06,400 --> 00:14:07,400
logs.

344
00:14:07,400 --> 00:14:09,760
In a control plane world, that evidence is a byproduct.

345
00:14:09,760 --> 00:14:13,480
In an app first world, it's a scavenger hunt, and the scavenger hunt costs more than

346
00:14:13,480 --> 00:14:14,480
the audit.

347
00:14:14,480 --> 00:14:16,640
Because it pulls senior people into data collection.

348
00:14:16,640 --> 00:14:20,920
It forces one time remediation work, it creates fire drills where the goal becomes producing

349
00:14:20,920 --> 00:14:23,440
a binder, not improving the system.

350
00:14:23,440 --> 00:14:24,560
And the outcome is predictable.

351
00:14:24,560 --> 00:14:28,380
You pass the audit by heroics, then go right back to the same behavior that created the

352
00:14:28,380 --> 00:14:30,080
audit risk in the first place.

353
00:14:30,080 --> 00:14:31,640
Here's the uncomfortable detail.

354
00:14:31,640 --> 00:14:34,920
The most expensive part of audit work is not the policy writing.

355
00:14:34,920 --> 00:14:37,880
It's the gap between your intent and your inventory.

356
00:14:37,880 --> 00:14:42,560
If you can't answer what exists and who owns it reliably, you don't have governance.

357
00:14:42,560 --> 00:14:44,200
You have narrative.

358
00:14:44,200 --> 00:14:46,560
Now, incident economics.

359
00:14:46,560 --> 00:14:49,320
In low-code estates rarely start as a breach.

360
00:14:49,320 --> 00:14:50,720
They start as something boring.

361
00:14:50,720 --> 00:14:56,000
A service principle credential expires, a connector changes behavior, a mailbox gets disabled,

362
00:14:56,000 --> 00:15:00,260
a DLP policy blocks something that was never supposed to be production, a user shares

363
00:15:00,260 --> 00:15:04,080
an app with the wrong group, copilot summarizes something it shouldn't.

364
00:15:04,080 --> 00:15:07,360
Then the blast radius decides whether the incident stays small.

365
00:15:07,360 --> 00:15:10,640
In an app first tenant, blast radius boundaries are weak.

366
00:15:10,640 --> 00:15:15,080
Everything lives in shared environments, shared connectors, shared permissions, shared service

367
00:15:15,080 --> 00:15:16,080
accounts.

368
00:15:16,080 --> 00:15:17,520
There are small fault propagates.

369
00:15:17,520 --> 00:15:19,280
A broken account breaks five flows.

370
00:15:19,280 --> 00:15:23,400
A connector outage knocks over business processes nobody knew were automated.

371
00:15:23,400 --> 00:15:27,880
And because inventories in complete incident response becomes discovery work under pressure.

372
00:15:27,880 --> 00:15:29,360
That is not incident response.

373
00:15:29,360 --> 00:15:31,360
That is archaeology within SLA.

374
00:15:31,360 --> 00:15:35,160
License and capacity waste is the quieter part of the bill, but it's the easiest to explain

375
00:15:35,160 --> 00:15:36,640
to finance.

376
00:15:36,640 --> 00:15:41,080
Unused apps still occupy inventory, create confusion, and sometimes keep premium connectors

377
00:15:41,080 --> 00:15:42,080
alive.

378
00:15:42,080 --> 00:15:45,400
Duplicate solutions appear because nobody can find what already exists.

379
00:15:45,400 --> 00:15:48,520
Pay as you go models, punish surprise success.

380
00:15:48,520 --> 00:15:53,040
Capacity gets consumed by zombie artifacts because nothing retires by default.

381
00:15:53,040 --> 00:15:57,520
And the organization ends up funding innovation that is mostly redundant infrastructure.

382
00:15:57,520 --> 00:16:00,000
So the executive framing is simple and brutal.

383
00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:05,480
You can invest once in a control plane or you can keep paying an operational tax for ambiguity.

384
00:16:05,480 --> 00:16:07,600
A control plane doesn't eliminate problems.

385
00:16:07,600 --> 00:16:09,640
It changes the unit economics of problems.

386
00:16:09,640 --> 00:16:10,640
It makes evidence cheap.

387
00:16:10,640 --> 00:16:11,960
It makes ownership durable.

388
00:16:11,960 --> 00:16:13,120
It makes drift visible.

389
00:16:13,120 --> 00:16:14,760
It drinks blast radius by design.

390
00:16:14,760 --> 00:16:17,320
And this is why we need more admins is the wrong conclusion.

391
00:16:17,320 --> 00:16:19,480
More admins just means you're scaling human middleware.

392
00:16:19,480 --> 00:16:20,800
The system will still drift.

393
00:16:20,800 --> 00:16:22,080
The tickets will still arrive.

394
00:16:22,080 --> 00:16:23,560
The audit will still demand proof.

395
00:16:23,560 --> 00:16:28,200
The only sustainable move is to move governance upstream into identity, provisioning, and policy

396
00:16:28,200 --> 00:16:29,200
enforcement.

397
00:16:29,200 --> 00:16:33,480
So the organization pays in design once instead of paying in tickets forever.

398
00:16:33,480 --> 00:16:35,920
And that's the mental model shift we need next.

399
00:16:35,920 --> 00:16:38,760
What you're actually building when you say control plane.

400
00:16:38,760 --> 00:16:41,280
Control plane 101, the thing you're actually building.

401
00:16:41,280 --> 00:16:43,320
A control plane is not a product you buy.

402
00:16:43,320 --> 00:16:45,160
It's not a dashboard you show an auditor.

403
00:16:45,160 --> 00:16:49,000
And it's definitely not a governance initiative you launch and then forget.

404
00:16:49,000 --> 00:16:52,640
In architectural terms, a control plane is the part of the system that decides what is

405
00:16:52,640 --> 00:16:57,320
allowed to exist, who is allowed to create it, what rules must be true at creation time,

406
00:16:57,320 --> 00:16:59,760
and what happens when those rules stop being true.

407
00:16:59,760 --> 00:17:02,000
It is decision making encoded.

408
00:17:02,000 --> 00:17:05,880
That distinction matters because most tenants already have governance artifacts, policies

409
00:17:05,880 --> 00:17:11,760
in a PDF, a naming standard, a COE SharePoint site, a Teams channel where people ask for approvals.

410
00:17:11,760 --> 00:17:13,120
None of that is a control plane.

411
00:17:13,120 --> 00:17:15,480
A control plane produces enforceable outcomes.

412
00:17:15,480 --> 00:17:19,800
If the outcome can't be enforced automatically repeatedly and without someone's memory, it's

413
00:17:19,800 --> 00:17:20,800
not control.

414
00:17:20,800 --> 00:17:22,040
It's hope with the ticketing system.

415
00:17:22,040 --> 00:17:23,800
Here's the cleanest mental model.

416
00:17:23,800 --> 00:17:25,560
Every modern platform has two planes.

417
00:17:25,560 --> 00:17:26,840
The control plane decides.

418
00:17:26,840 --> 00:17:28,320
The data plane executes.

419
00:17:28,320 --> 00:17:30,480
The data plane is the stuff people see.

420
00:17:30,480 --> 00:17:34,920
Apps, flows, approvals, connectors, co-pilot, dashboards, integrations.

421
00:17:34,920 --> 00:17:36,400
It's where value gets delivered.

422
00:17:36,400 --> 00:17:40,400
It's also where mistakes are easy to ship because value is visible and risk is not.

423
00:17:40,400 --> 00:17:45,000
The control plane is the stuff people avoid because it feels like admin work.

424
00:17:45,000 --> 00:17:49,760
Identity standards, policy engines, environment boundaries, life cycle rules, inventory, telemetry,

425
00:17:49,760 --> 00:17:51,400
and automated evidence.

426
00:17:51,400 --> 00:17:53,480
But the control plane is where scale lives.

427
00:17:53,480 --> 00:17:55,480
Without it, every app becomes a snowflake.

428
00:17:55,480 --> 00:17:56,920
Every flow becomes a one off.

429
00:17:56,920 --> 00:17:58,520
Every exception becomes permanent.

430
00:17:58,520 --> 00:18:02,440
And you spend your life explaining to executives why this should have been easy.

431
00:18:02,440 --> 00:18:04,480
So what does the control plane actually output?

432
00:18:04,480 --> 00:18:06,160
Four things every time.

433
00:18:06,160 --> 00:18:07,680
First identity outcomes.

434
00:18:07,680 --> 00:18:11,720
Not just who signed in, but which principles exist, how they authenticate, how they get

435
00:18:11,720 --> 00:18:14,000
permissions, and how those permissions get reviewed.

436
00:18:14,000 --> 00:18:17,360
Users, groups, service principles, managed identities, and now agents.

437
00:18:17,360 --> 00:18:18,360
These are the actors.

438
00:18:18,360 --> 00:18:20,760
If you don't govern actors, you can't govern actions.

439
00:18:20,760 --> 00:18:23,240
Second, policy outcomes.

440
00:18:23,240 --> 00:18:24,240
Conditional access.

441
00:18:24,240 --> 00:18:26,040
RBC boundaries.

442
00:18:26,040 --> 00:18:27,680
Connector allow denialists.

443
00:18:27,680 --> 00:18:29,160
DLP boundaries.

444
00:18:29,160 --> 00:18:30,840
Tenant isolation rules.

445
00:18:30,840 --> 00:18:32,360
Environment classification.

446
00:18:32,360 --> 00:18:33,360
Policy is not pros.

447
00:18:33,360 --> 00:18:38,680
Policy is compiled intent that results in an allow, block, or require more friction decision.

448
00:18:38,680 --> 00:18:41,160
Third, life cycle outcomes.

449
00:18:41,160 --> 00:18:43,280
Creation, change, and retirement.

450
00:18:43,280 --> 00:18:45,720
Most orgs automate creation and ignore retirement.

451
00:18:45,720 --> 00:18:47,280
That is how you get 3,000 apps.

452
00:18:47,280 --> 00:18:50,360
A control plane treats retirement as a default behavior.

453
00:18:50,360 --> 00:18:52,000
Inactivity thresholds.

454
00:18:52,000 --> 00:18:56,640
Own a verification, deprecation notices, quarantine pathways, and deletion gates.

455
00:18:56,640 --> 00:18:58,920
Fourth, observability outcomes.

456
00:18:58,920 --> 00:19:01,080
Inventory that answers what exists.

457
00:19:01,080 --> 00:19:04,840
Inventory that answers what changed, and evidence that answers can you prove it.

458
00:19:04,840 --> 00:19:07,160
If you can't observe drift, you can't claim control.

459
00:19:07,160 --> 00:19:08,760
You can only claim intent.

460
00:19:08,760 --> 00:19:11,040
Now the rule that makes architects uncomfortable.

461
00:19:11,040 --> 00:19:13,440
The control plane has to be upstream of the maker.

462
00:19:13,440 --> 00:19:15,240
Not above them in hierarchy.

463
00:19:15,240 --> 00:19:16,440
Upstream in the flow of creation.

464
00:19:16,440 --> 00:19:20,800
If you let people create assets first, and then ask for review later, you already lost.

465
00:19:20,800 --> 00:19:25,240
The asset exists, dependencies form, business value attaches to it, and you will not delete

466
00:19:25,240 --> 00:19:26,240
it.

467
00:19:26,240 --> 00:19:27,240
You will negotiate around it.

468
00:19:27,240 --> 00:19:28,560
That's how exceptions become architecture.

469
00:19:28,560 --> 00:19:33,520
So control plane engineering means you standardize the pathways, assets, are born through.

470
00:19:33,520 --> 00:19:37,040
It means creation is an API call or a govern template, not a free for all.

471
00:19:37,040 --> 00:19:39,360
It means ownership is enforced by design.

472
00:19:39,360 --> 00:19:40,360
Co-owners.

473
00:19:40,360 --> 00:19:42,000
Continuity identities.

474
00:19:42,000 --> 00:19:44,320
And rules that prevent single human dependency.

475
00:19:44,320 --> 00:19:49,560
It means DLP and connector policy are applied at creation time, not after a leak scares legal.

476
00:19:49,560 --> 00:19:54,360
It means the tenant generates its own inventory continuously, so audit evidence is not a quarterly

477
00:19:54,360 --> 00:19:55,360
panic.

478
00:19:55,360 --> 00:19:59,560
You can implement this inside Microsoft's ecosystem without inventing a new platform.

479
00:19:59,560 --> 00:20:02,080
Entra already behaves like a distributed decision engine.

480
00:20:02,080 --> 00:20:04,760
Graph already behaves like the provisioning bus.

481
00:20:04,760 --> 00:20:07,760
Per view already behaves like a policy enforcement layer.

482
00:20:07,760 --> 00:20:10,920
Power platform already exposes environment and connector governance surfaces.

483
00:20:10,920 --> 00:20:12,400
The missing piece is not tooling.

484
00:20:12,400 --> 00:20:14,680
The missing piece is intent encoded as a system.

485
00:20:14,680 --> 00:20:16,840
So when someone asks, what are we building?

486
00:20:16,840 --> 00:20:17,960
The answer is simple.

487
00:20:17,960 --> 00:20:23,320
A programmable operating model that makes safe behavior the default and unsafe behavior expensive.

488
00:20:23,320 --> 00:20:27,120
Now we can talk about how Microsoft stack already contains control planes, whether you use

489
00:20:27,120 --> 00:20:28,680
them or not.

490
00:20:28,680 --> 00:20:30,440
Microsoft stack already has control planes.

491
00:20:30,440 --> 00:20:32,080
You're just not using them.

492
00:20:32,080 --> 00:20:35,120
Microsoft stack already assumes you're operating a control plane.

493
00:20:35,120 --> 00:20:39,240
The only thing optional is whether you admit it and design it or pretend it's admin stuff

494
00:20:39,240 --> 00:20:41,480
and let it emerge as accidental behavior.

495
00:20:41,480 --> 00:20:42,720
Start with Entra ID.

496
00:20:42,720 --> 00:20:45,160
Most people still describe it as an identity provider.

497
00:20:45,160 --> 00:20:48,160
Users log in, tokens get issued, everyone goes home.

498
00:20:48,160 --> 00:20:49,480
That description is comforting.

499
00:20:49,480 --> 00:20:51,240
It's also incomplete.

500
00:20:51,240 --> 00:20:53,280
Entra is a distributed decision engine that sits

501
00:20:53,280 --> 00:20:57,840
in the middle of every meaningful action in Microsoft 365 and Azure.

502
00:20:57,840 --> 00:21:01,720
It evaluates who you are, what you're trying to do, what condition you're doing it under,

503
00:21:01,720 --> 00:21:03,400
and what policy should shape the outcome.

504
00:21:03,400 --> 00:21:05,000
That means Entra isn't a feature.

505
00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:06,520
It's the control plane substrate.

506
00:21:06,520 --> 00:21:09,760
And once you accept that, a lot of bad tenant behavior becomes explainable.

507
00:21:09,760 --> 00:21:13,640
When you let people create service principles with broad permissions, you didn't configure

508
00:21:13,640 --> 00:21:14,640
an app.

509
00:21:14,640 --> 00:21:18,360
Then you introduced a new non-human principle into the decision graph with a blast radius

510
00:21:18,360 --> 00:21:19,640
that outlives the project.

511
00:21:19,640 --> 00:21:22,760
The system will keep honoring that principle until you revoke it.

512
00:21:22,760 --> 00:21:25,200
The platform doesn't remember your original intent.

513
00:21:25,200 --> 00:21:26,840
It remembers your granted permissions.

514
00:21:26,840 --> 00:21:29,040
Then there's conditional access.

515
00:21:29,040 --> 00:21:31,640
Microsoft markets it as if this than that.

516
00:21:31,640 --> 00:21:35,040
That is technically correct, but it hides the operational reality.

517
00:21:35,040 --> 00:21:37,400
Policies are additive, not prioritized.

518
00:21:37,400 --> 00:21:40,240
Multiple policies can apply to the same sign-in.

519
00:21:40,240 --> 00:21:42,000
Exclusions create alternate universes.

520
00:21:42,000 --> 00:21:48,160
And over time, the set of possible evaluations becomes too large to hold in a human head.

521
00:21:48,160 --> 00:21:50,600
Practitioners call this conditional chaos for a reason.

522
00:21:50,600 --> 00:21:54,220
Not because conditional access is unstable, but because humans treat it like a series of

523
00:21:54,220 --> 00:21:56,320
patches instead of a compiled model.

524
00:21:56,320 --> 00:21:59,560
A real control plane treats conditional access like a compiler.

525
00:21:59,560 --> 00:22:03,520
You feed it signals and assignments, and you expect deterministic enforcement outcomes.

526
00:22:03,520 --> 00:22:07,520
That requires testing, simulation, and lifecycle management of the policy set.

527
00:22:07,520 --> 00:22:11,600
If your CA strategy is, we'll add a policy when something scary happens.

528
00:22:11,600 --> 00:22:13,080
You're not building a model.

529
00:22:13,080 --> 00:22:14,560
You're building a pile.

530
00:22:14,560 --> 00:22:16,080
Next, per view, DLP.

531
00:22:16,080 --> 00:22:18,840
This is where organizations lie to themselves with checkboxes.

532
00:22:18,840 --> 00:22:22,560
They enable DLP and declare victory, but DLP is not a compliance sticker.

533
00:22:22,560 --> 00:22:25,400
It's a boundary enforcement layer across data pathways.

534
00:22:25,400 --> 00:22:30,160
Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, Endpoints, and now co-pilot prompts and AI interactions.

535
00:22:30,160 --> 00:22:34,400
The reason it feels inconsistent in many tenants isn't because the engine is random.

536
00:22:34,400 --> 00:22:37,560
It's because the estate is random, and the coverage is uneven.

537
00:22:37,560 --> 00:22:40,520
And the AI era makes that unevenness painfully visible.

538
00:22:40,520 --> 00:22:44,680
In January, 2026, Microsoft acknowledged a co-pilot chat bug where confidential labeled

539
00:22:44,680 --> 00:22:50,400
emails, and sent items, and drafts could be incorrectly processed despite configured DLP policies.

540
00:22:50,400 --> 00:22:54,760
Microsoft's statement emphasized that access controls remained intact, but the behavior

541
00:22:54,760 --> 00:22:57,360
still violated the intended exclusion model.

542
00:22:57,360 --> 00:23:00,120
That incident isn't an argument to panic and block AI.

543
00:23:00,120 --> 00:23:03,600
It's proof that your control plane has to assume defects happen.

544
00:23:03,600 --> 00:23:05,760
Policy needs layers, monitoring, and verification.

545
00:23:05,760 --> 00:23:08,840
DLP is a control plane component, not a single line of defense.

546
00:23:08,840 --> 00:23:13,040
Now Microsoft graph, people keep calling it the developer API, which is the same category

547
00:23:13,040 --> 00:23:15,480
error as calling entrajust identity.

548
00:23:15,480 --> 00:23:17,720
Graph is the orchestration bus for the Microsoft Cloud.

549
00:23:17,720 --> 00:23:23,760
It's how you programmatically create, read, change, and retire objects at scale.

550
00:23:23,760 --> 00:23:28,720
Applications, service principles, groups, users, configurations, and the inventory metadata,

551
00:23:28,720 --> 00:23:30,920
you keep pretending you'll track manually.

552
00:23:30,920 --> 00:23:36,320
And Graph has distinct patterns for scale, real-time transactional calls for operational changes,

553
00:23:36,320 --> 00:23:41,040
event-driven notifications for low latency change detection, and data connect for bulk,

554
00:23:41,040 --> 00:23:45,360
scheduled exports when you need to analyze an entire tenant without melting the API limits.

555
00:23:45,360 --> 00:23:49,960
In other words, Graph is how you stop doing governance as artisanal portal clicking.

556
00:23:49,960 --> 00:23:53,760
It's how you turn life cycle and inventory into repeatable system behavior.

557
00:23:53,760 --> 00:23:55,680
Finally, power platforms admin surface.

558
00:23:55,680 --> 00:23:59,400
The admin center exists because the platform designers already know what your estate will

559
00:23:59,400 --> 00:24:01,240
look like at scale.

560
00:24:01,240 --> 00:24:07,000
Environments proliferate, connectors sprawl, ownership decays, and temporary becomes permanent.

561
00:24:07,000 --> 00:24:12,160
The tooling supports environment strategies, DLP policies, connector governance, and analytics,

562
00:24:12,160 --> 00:24:13,720
but tooling isn't architecture.

563
00:24:13,720 --> 00:24:17,240
Without an operating model, the admin center becomes a dashboard of regret.

564
00:24:17,240 --> 00:24:19,280
So the uncomfortable conclusion is this.

565
00:24:19,280 --> 00:24:20,720
You already have control planes.

566
00:24:20,720 --> 00:24:22,000
You're already paying for them.

567
00:24:22,000 --> 00:24:25,800
You're just using them like a set of disconnected admin pages instead of a single programmable

568
00:24:25,800 --> 00:24:27,400
system that enforces intent.

569
00:24:27,400 --> 00:24:31,200
And when you do that, you get exactly what the system produces by default, conditional

570
00:24:31,200 --> 00:24:36,960
chaos, connector creep, orphaned principles, and an audit story held together by screenshots.

571
00:24:36,960 --> 00:24:39,960
Next, the fix is not use more Microsoft.

572
00:24:39,960 --> 00:24:43,960
The fix is to anchor on three components and engineer them like infrastructure, an identity

573
00:24:43,960 --> 00:24:48,560
policy engine, graph-based provisioning, and a DLP enforcement layer.

574
00:24:48,560 --> 00:24:50,680
Component one, identity policy engine.

575
00:24:50,680 --> 00:24:54,680
The first control plane component is the identity policy engine because everything else

576
00:24:54,680 --> 00:24:59,400
is just a different way to ask the same question, who is allowed to do what, to which data,

577
00:24:59,400 --> 00:25:01,760
using which tools, under which conditions.

578
00:25:01,760 --> 00:25:03,440
Most tenants try to govern apps.

579
00:25:03,440 --> 00:25:04,440
That's backwards.

580
00:25:04,440 --> 00:25:05,440
Apps are outputs.

581
00:25:05,440 --> 00:25:09,880
Apps are causes, users, groups, service principles, managed identities, and now agents.

582
00:25:09,880 --> 00:25:12,480
Those are the entities that actually execute actions.

583
00:25:12,480 --> 00:25:15,000
If you don't govern principles, you can't govern outcomes.

584
00:25:15,000 --> 00:25:17,680
You just chase artifacts after they already exist.

585
00:25:17,680 --> 00:25:22,120
This is also where least privilege stops being a slogan and becomes architecture.

586
00:25:22,120 --> 00:25:26,280
In practice, least privilege is three constraints that have to be true at the same time.

587
00:25:26,280 --> 00:25:29,520
The identity has to be scoped to the minimum role or permission set.

588
00:25:29,520 --> 00:25:32,440
That scope has to be bounded to the right resource boundary.

589
00:25:32,440 --> 00:25:37,280
And the assignment has to expire or be reattested, so Drift doesn't turn a temporary grant into

590
00:25:37,280 --> 00:25:38,880
a permanent liability.

591
00:25:38,880 --> 00:25:40,400
And Drift is not a special case.

592
00:25:40,400 --> 00:25:42,880
Drift is the default state of enterprise identity.

593
00:25:42,880 --> 00:25:44,280
People move teams.

594
00:25:44,280 --> 00:25:45,800
Groups get repurposed.

595
00:25:45,800 --> 00:25:46,800
Projects end.

596
00:25:46,800 --> 00:25:50,760
Service principles get created for one proof of concept and then quietly become production

597
00:25:50,760 --> 00:25:52,000
dependencies.

598
00:25:52,000 --> 00:25:53,720
Someone grants directory.

599
00:25:53,720 --> 00:25:54,720
Read right.

600
00:25:54,720 --> 00:25:58,600
All at 2am to unblock the deployment and nobody ever revisits it because the deployment

601
00:25:58,600 --> 00:25:59,600
succeeded.

602
00:25:59,600 --> 00:26:01,200
Therefore, the decision is socially invisible.

603
00:26:01,200 --> 00:26:02,960
The system did exactly what it was told.

604
00:26:02,960 --> 00:26:06,920
That means the identity policy engine has to treat policy as durable under change, not

605
00:26:06,920 --> 00:26:08,240
perfect under assumptions.

606
00:26:08,240 --> 00:26:12,900
It has to survive the reality that role assignments will change, ownership will decay, and new

607
00:26:12,900 --> 00:26:16,000
principles will appear faster than you can review them.

608
00:26:16,000 --> 00:26:19,600
This is why identity governance has to be principle first, not app first.

609
00:26:19,600 --> 00:26:22,000
Every principle should have three things encoded.

610
00:26:22,000 --> 00:26:24,860
An owner, a purpose, and a life cycle boundary.

611
00:26:24,860 --> 00:26:29,760
Not someone knows, but a declared chain of accountability that can be queried, audited,

612
00:26:29,760 --> 00:26:30,760
and enforced.

613
00:26:30,760 --> 00:26:32,880
Not name and owner, you don't have an identity.

614
00:26:32,880 --> 00:26:34,360
You have a ghost with permissions.

615
00:26:34,360 --> 00:26:38,260
Now conditional access sits on top of this and most organizations treat it like a bag of

616
00:26:38,260 --> 00:26:39,260
rules.

617
00:26:39,260 --> 00:26:40,500
That's how you get conditional chaos.

618
00:26:40,500 --> 00:26:44,800
The more accurate model is to treat conditional access like an authorization compiler.

619
00:26:44,800 --> 00:26:50,640
It takes inputs, signals like user risk, sign-in-risk, device compliance, location, client

620
00:26:50,640 --> 00:26:53,680
type, and compiles them into enforcement outcomes.

621
00:26:53,680 --> 00:26:59,160
Allow, block, require, MFA, force-compliant device, apply session controls.

622
00:26:59,160 --> 00:27:02,440
That compiler analogy matters because compiles demand discipline.

623
00:27:02,440 --> 00:27:04,120
You don't just add a policy.

624
00:27:04,120 --> 00:27:05,320
You define intent.

625
00:27:05,320 --> 00:27:06,320
You test permutations.

626
00:27:06,320 --> 00:27:09,720
You avoid overlapping logic that creates unpredictable behavior.

627
00:27:09,720 --> 00:27:12,520
And you version changes like you would any other critical system.

628
00:27:12,520 --> 00:27:16,160
Otherwise you're not building a security model, you're writing fortune telling rules,

629
00:27:16,160 --> 00:27:18,640
and hoping the next incident doesn't find the gap.

630
00:27:18,640 --> 00:27:22,960
There's also a subtle identity mistake that shows up in power platform in M365 automation

631
00:27:22,960 --> 00:27:23,960
estates.

632
00:27:23,960 --> 00:27:26,160
People govern interactive users aggressively.

633
00:27:26,160 --> 00:27:28,520
Then ignore non-human identities completely.

634
00:27:28,520 --> 00:27:31,360
The result is hilarious in the darkest possible way.

635
00:27:31,360 --> 00:27:35,720
Humans get MFA prompts and access reviews while service principles run with broad permissions

636
00:27:35,720 --> 00:27:38,480
for years because nobody wants to break the automation.

637
00:27:38,480 --> 00:27:43,080
So the identity policy engine has to govern workload identities as first class citizens.

638
00:27:43,080 --> 00:27:47,240
Service principles, managed identities, app registrations, and agent identities.

639
00:27:47,240 --> 00:27:48,920
These are not implementation details.

640
00:27:48,920 --> 00:27:52,040
They are the fastest growing risk surface in modern tenants.

641
00:27:52,040 --> 00:27:56,480
And yes, agents make this worse, not because agents are magical, but because they increase

642
00:27:56,480 --> 00:27:58,960
the number of principles that can act.

643
00:27:58,960 --> 00:28:03,240
An agent that can call tools is effectively a principle that can execute workflows at

644
00:28:03,240 --> 00:28:04,240
machine speed.

645
00:28:04,240 --> 00:28:08,160
If you let that identity inherit broad access because we'll monitor it, you've moved

646
00:28:08,160 --> 00:28:11,840
from deterministic security to probabilistic damage control.

647
00:28:11,840 --> 00:28:14,840
So what does deterministic intent look like in identity terms?

648
00:28:14,840 --> 00:28:18,920
It looks like separation of duties encoded in roles not implied by org charts.

649
00:28:18,920 --> 00:28:22,840
It looks like access reviews that are tied to real ownership and real usage, not calendar

650
00:28:22,840 --> 00:28:23,840
reminders.

651
00:28:23,840 --> 00:28:28,360
It looks like policies written as if an auditor will ask tomorrow, show me why this identity

652
00:28:28,360 --> 00:28:30,880
needed this permission and who approved it.

653
00:28:30,880 --> 00:28:34,840
And it looks like denying the dangerous convenience path defaulting to broad scopes because

654
00:28:34,840 --> 00:28:36,840
it's easier than designing boundaries.

655
00:28:36,840 --> 00:28:40,160
Because the whole point of a control plane is to remove human review from the hot path

656
00:28:40,160 --> 00:28:42,000
without removing accountability.

657
00:28:42,000 --> 00:28:46,160
Identity policy does that by making the allowed pathways obvious and the forbidden pathways

658
00:28:46,160 --> 00:28:47,400
expensive.

659
00:28:47,400 --> 00:28:52,040
Once identity is engineered this way, the rest of the control plane becomes possible.

660
00:28:52,040 --> 00:28:56,400
Planning stops being a TISNAL portal work and becomes repeatable orchestration.

661
00:28:56,400 --> 00:28:59,800
But provisioning without identity guardrails is just faster sprawl.

662
00:28:59,800 --> 00:29:04,160
So next, graph-based provisioning as the orchestration backbone.

663
00:29:04,160 --> 00:29:07,280
Component 2, graph-based provisioning as orchestration backbone.

664
00:29:07,280 --> 00:29:10,880
Once identity is engineered, provisioning becomes the next choke point.

665
00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:14,880
And most organizations treat provisioning like a set of one-off errands.

666
00:29:14,880 --> 00:29:18,760
Someone creates an environment, someone makes a group, someone registers an app, someone

667
00:29:18,760 --> 00:29:22,920
grants a permission, someone documents it, and everyone prays it stays true.

668
00:29:22,920 --> 00:29:25,720
That is not provisioning, that is artisanal tenancy.

669
00:29:25,720 --> 00:29:30,360
Graph-based provisioning is the move from people click portals to the tenant is programmable.

670
00:29:30,360 --> 00:29:33,160
Microsoft Graph is the plumbing that already exists for this.

671
00:29:33,160 --> 00:29:37,880
A unified endpoint that lets you create, read, change, and retire objects across Microsoft

672
00:29:37,880 --> 00:29:41,680
365 and Entra, not as a developer flex, as an operating model.

673
00:29:41,680 --> 00:29:42,680
Here's why this matters.

674
00:29:42,680 --> 00:29:45,480
A control plane doesn't scale by having better humans.

675
00:29:45,480 --> 00:29:47,640
It scales by having repeatable pathways.

676
00:29:47,640 --> 00:29:51,200
Graph is how you standardize the pathways assets are born through, and it immediately

677
00:29:51,200 --> 00:29:53,400
forces an uncomfortable discipline.

678
00:29:53,400 --> 00:29:57,480
If you can't express your life cycle rules as an API operation, your life cycle rules

679
00:29:57,480 --> 00:30:01,160
aren't real, they're social agreements.

680
00:30:01,160 --> 00:30:04,360
Graph enables two provisioning patterns that most teams confuse.

681
00:30:04,360 --> 00:30:07,280
The first is real-time transactional provisioning.

682
00:30:07,280 --> 00:30:11,760
Someone requests an app, a flow, a group, a service principle change, a permission update,

683
00:30:11,760 --> 00:30:13,080
and graph executes it.

684
00:30:13,080 --> 00:30:17,080
That's the wiring model, predictable inputs, predictable outputs, with logs and request

685
00:30:17,080 --> 00:30:18,840
IDs that actually means something.

686
00:30:18,840 --> 00:30:21,080
The second is bulk and asynchronous governance.

687
00:30:21,080 --> 00:30:25,120
When you need to answer tenant-wide questions, inventory, ownership drift, connector usage,

688
00:30:25,120 --> 00:30:28,800
high-risk principles, you don't spam the live API and hope throttling doesn't ruin your

689
00:30:28,800 --> 00:30:29,800
week.

690
00:30:29,800 --> 00:30:31,320
You use the right pattern.

691
00:30:31,320 --> 00:30:35,480
Scheduled bulk exports via graph data connect when available, change notifications where

692
00:30:35,480 --> 00:30:40,800
they fit, and event-driven signals where you need low latency awareness.

693
00:30:40,800 --> 00:30:42,480
The point is not which feature is trendy.

694
00:30:42,480 --> 00:30:47,360
The point is you design for scale instead of discovering scale at 3,000 apps.

695
00:30:47,360 --> 00:30:51,160
Now the part most people get wrong, permissions, provisioning automation wants app only permissions

696
00:30:51,160 --> 00:30:55,920
because nobody wants a service account with MFA as a runtime dependency.

697
00:30:55,920 --> 00:30:59,000
Auditors want least privilege and clear blast radius.

698
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:02,760
Those desires collide directly and this is where control planes either become mature

699
00:31:02,760 --> 00:31:05,560
or become a security incident with better branding.

700
00:31:05,560 --> 00:31:09,200
Graph has a delegated permission model and an application permission model.

701
00:31:09,200 --> 00:31:12,440
Delegated is user context, the call acts as a human.

702
00:31:12,440 --> 00:31:15,160
Deem in context, the call acts as the app.

703
00:31:15,160 --> 00:31:19,800
For a control plane, app only is usually unavoidable, but it must be engineered like a workload

704
00:31:19,800 --> 00:31:24,440
identity with strict boundaries, ownership and continuous review, otherwise you just created

705
00:31:24,440 --> 00:31:26,600
the most powerful ghost in your tenant.

706
00:31:26,600 --> 00:31:29,440
So the orchestration backbone needs a discipline.

707
00:31:29,440 --> 00:31:32,920
Separate the provisional identity from the workload identities it creates.

708
00:31:32,920 --> 00:31:36,600
The control plane principle should have only the narrow set of graph permissions required

709
00:31:36,600 --> 00:31:40,600
to enact approved patterns, no browsing rights out of convenience, no directory-wide right

710
00:31:40,600 --> 00:31:44,120
access because it was faster and no will tighten it later.

711
00:31:44,120 --> 00:31:45,600
Later, never comes.

712
00:31:45,600 --> 00:31:49,760
Later becomes drift and graph will punish you operationally if you treat it like an infinite

713
00:31:49,760 --> 00:31:51,000
resource.

714
00:31:51,000 --> 00:31:54,160
Quoters and throttling exist and that's not Microsoft being annoying.

715
00:31:54,160 --> 00:31:57,760
That's the platform telling you something architectural, your provisioning system must tolerate

716
00:31:57,760 --> 00:32:00,120
retries back off and partial failure.

717
00:32:00,120 --> 00:32:03,880
So the orchestration logic has to behave like production code, even if you built it with

718
00:32:03,880 --> 00:32:08,640
low code tools, you design id-importancy, you log every request with correlation IDs,

719
00:32:08,640 --> 00:32:10,360
you respect retry after headers.

720
00:32:10,360 --> 00:32:14,160
You implement dead letter paths for failures because if your control plane collapses under

721
00:32:14,160 --> 00:32:17,840
throttling, you didn't build governance, you built a denial of service against your own

722
00:32:17,840 --> 00:32:19,000
operating model.

723
00:32:19,000 --> 00:32:22,720
This is also why wiring, not firefighting is the only mindset that works.

724
00:32:22,720 --> 00:32:26,960
When provisioning is repeatable, you stop solving the same problem as a new incident every

725
00:32:26,960 --> 00:32:27,960
week.

726
00:32:27,960 --> 00:32:31,720
You stop negotiating how an environment gets created, you stop arguing about naming, you

727
00:32:31,720 --> 00:32:33,600
stop playing detective on who owns what?

728
00:32:33,600 --> 00:32:37,480
The control plane makes those outcomes default, but there's a trap here and it's the one

729
00:32:37,480 --> 00:32:40,160
that destroys most automation initiatives.

730
00:32:40,160 --> 00:32:43,440
Provisioning without policy gates just accelerates sprawl.

731
00:32:43,440 --> 00:32:47,620
If your graph workflow can create apps faster than your identity and DLP boundaries can

732
00:32:47,620 --> 00:32:51,480
constrain them, you're not building a control plane, you're building an app factory that

733
00:32:51,480 --> 00:32:53,480
produces faster entropy.

734
00:32:53,480 --> 00:32:57,040
So graph-based provisioning has to be coupled to your policy engines.

735
00:32:57,040 --> 00:33:01,320
Every create operation needs a classification decision, which zone, which connector set,

736
00:33:01,320 --> 00:33:05,800
which ownership rule, which retention and audit requirements, which DLP policy applies

737
00:33:05,800 --> 00:33:07,080
at birth.

738
00:33:07,080 --> 00:33:11,680
DLP is not just create, it's create inside constraints, that's why graph is the backbone,

739
00:33:11,680 --> 00:33:15,640
not the whole body, it's the orchestration bus that makes life cycle real.

740
00:33:15,640 --> 00:33:19,480
Standardized creation, enforced ownership, automated retirement triggers and continuous

741
00:33:19,480 --> 00:33:20,640
inventory.

742
00:33:20,640 --> 00:33:23,200
Identity decides who can act, graph makes action repeatable.

743
00:33:23,200 --> 00:33:27,040
Now you need the third layer to stop data pathways from turning into leaks.

744
00:33:27,040 --> 00:33:30,840
DLP as an enforcement boundary, not a compliance checkbox.

745
00:33:30,840 --> 00:33:33,120
Component 3, DLP enforcement layer.

746
00:33:33,120 --> 00:33:37,320
The third control plane component is DLP because identity and provisioning don't matter if

747
00:33:37,320 --> 00:33:41,440
data can still drift into the wrong places through perfectly valid connectors.

748
00:33:41,440 --> 00:33:45,960
DLP is not a compliance checkbox, it's boundary enforcement across data pathways.

749
00:33:45,960 --> 00:33:50,440
Which connectors can talk to which connectors, which content can be processed by which experiences

750
00:33:50,440 --> 00:33:54,320
and which actions should be blocked, audited or allowed with friction.

751
00:33:54,320 --> 00:33:57,720
And it has to be designed like a system boundary, not a moral guideline.

752
00:33:57,720 --> 00:34:01,200
Here's what most people miss, connectors are not integrations, connectors are egress

753
00:34:01,200 --> 00:34:05,120
routes, they're how data leaves the governed backbone and finds its way into a consumer

754
00:34:05,120 --> 00:34:09,160
service, a personal mailbox, a random spreadsheet or now an AI prompt.

755
00:34:09,160 --> 00:34:13,600
So when a tenant says we'll just turn on DLP, but continues to allow unrestricted connector

756
00:34:13,600 --> 00:34:18,000
pairing in a single environment strategy, what they've built is not governance.

757
00:34:18,000 --> 00:34:19,880
It's conditional chaos with a different label.

758
00:34:19,880 --> 00:34:22,160
Power Platform makes this painfully concrete.

759
00:34:22,160 --> 00:34:25,880
DLP policies classify connectors into business and non-business groups so they can't be

760
00:34:25,880 --> 00:34:27,640
combined in the same app or flow.

761
00:34:27,640 --> 00:34:31,720
And that's the advertised mechanism. The actual architectural job is deciding what the business

762
00:34:31,720 --> 00:34:33,360
group even means per zone.

763
00:34:33,360 --> 00:34:36,880
A zone strategy is the only model that survives scale.

764
00:34:36,880 --> 00:34:41,280
Green zones for exploration, yellow zones for internal productivity, red zones for regulated

765
00:34:41,280 --> 00:34:45,560
workloads, same platform, different risk posture, different connector allowance, different

766
00:34:45,560 --> 00:34:48,520
evidence expectations.

767
00:34:48,520 --> 00:34:52,360
Otherwise you get the default environment gravity problem again.

768
00:34:52,360 --> 00:34:55,920
Everything lives in one place because it's convenient and you try to enforce enterprise

769
00:34:55,920 --> 00:34:58,000
controls on a playground.

770
00:34:58,000 --> 00:34:59,000
That doesn't work.

771
00:34:59,000 --> 00:35:03,000
It just trains people to root around the control, so the DLP control plane output is not

772
00:35:03,000 --> 00:35:04,600
a policy exists.

773
00:35:04,600 --> 00:35:08,080
Its unsafe pairings are impossible by default in the zones that matter.

774
00:35:08,080 --> 00:35:12,120
Now DLP gets even more interesting and more uncomfortable when you bring co-pilot into

775
00:35:12,120 --> 00:35:13,120
the estate.

776
00:35:13,120 --> 00:35:17,520
The common executive belief is that co-pilot is just a UI over Microsoft Graph.

777
00:35:17,520 --> 00:35:19,760
Therefore the existing permission model will handle it.

778
00:35:19,760 --> 00:35:21,160
That's only half true.

779
00:35:21,160 --> 00:35:25,320
Co-pilot's grounding honors access boundaries, but it also creates new processing surfaces.

780
00:35:25,320 --> 00:35:31,280
Trump's, summaries, citations and cross-app experiences where label enforcement is not always consistent.

781
00:35:31,280 --> 00:35:33,080
And we have real evidence of that.

782
00:35:33,080 --> 00:35:39,280
In January 2026, Microsoft tracked an incident, service advisory CW1226324, where co-pilot chat

783
00:35:39,280 --> 00:35:43,640
could incorrectly process confidential labeled emails from send items and drafts, despite

784
00:35:43,640 --> 00:35:46,880
configured DLP and sensitivity label controls.

785
00:35:46,880 --> 00:35:50,840
Microsoft fixed its server side and stated it didn't grant users access to anything they

786
00:35:50,840 --> 00:35:52,760
weren't already authorized to see.

787
00:35:52,760 --> 00:35:55,960
That statement is legally tidy, it's also architecturally irrelevant.

788
00:35:55,960 --> 00:35:57,440
The lesson is simple.

789
00:35:57,440 --> 00:36:02,720
Defects happen at the seams, so your DLP design can't assume labels always block everywhere.

790
00:36:02,720 --> 00:36:06,560
It has to assume partial coverage inconsistent enforcement across experiences and the need

791
00:36:06,560 --> 00:36:11,520
for monitoring to detect when the system's promise and the system's behavior diverge.

792
00:36:11,520 --> 00:36:13,480
That's what control plane thinking looks like.

793
00:36:13,480 --> 00:36:15,960
Controlls are layered, tested and observed, not declared.

794
00:36:15,960 --> 00:36:19,040
Practically that means you use two DLP modes in parallel.

795
00:36:19,040 --> 00:36:22,120
First, power platform connector governance at the environment level.

796
00:36:22,120 --> 00:36:27,160
Allow deny lists per zone, restricted high-risk connectors in production, and a clear exception

797
00:36:27,160 --> 00:36:31,760
pathway that is engineered as a workflow, not an email to a person.

798
00:36:31,760 --> 00:36:36,600
In wave-era tooling, Microsoft keeps adding more admin controls to do this, but the architecture

799
00:36:36,600 --> 00:36:38,000
remains the same.

800
00:36:38,000 --> 00:36:42,000
You decide where connector freedom exists and where it doesn't.

801
00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:46,720
Second, per view DLP for co-pilot and co-pilot chat policies that restrict processing based

802
00:36:46,720 --> 00:36:49,840
on sensitive information types and sensitivity labels.

803
00:36:49,840 --> 00:36:51,440
And here's the uncomfortable rule.

804
00:36:51,440 --> 00:36:54,280
Label-based controls only work if labeling maturity exists.

805
00:36:54,280 --> 00:36:56,960
If your tenant labels nothing, DLP protects nothing.

806
00:36:56,960 --> 00:37:00,840
If your tenant labels inconsistently, DLP behaves inconsistently.

807
00:37:00,840 --> 00:37:03,480
The system can't enforce what you didn't classify.

808
00:37:03,480 --> 00:37:08,240
So DLP becomes a forcing function for data hygiene, not because compliance wants it, but because

809
00:37:08,240 --> 00:37:10,920
AI makes poor classification visible.

810
00:37:10,920 --> 00:37:14,680
People don't fear a folder full of unlabeled documents until co-pilot can summarize them

811
00:37:14,680 --> 00:37:16,000
in five seconds.

812
00:37:16,000 --> 00:37:18,200
Now none of this means DLP is perfect.

813
00:37:18,200 --> 00:37:22,560
There are no limitations, coverage gaps across scenarios, propagation delays, and the reality

814
00:37:22,560 --> 00:37:26,800
that you can't always combine every condition in a single rule set the way you'd want.

815
00:37:26,800 --> 00:37:28,600
That's not an argument against DLP.

816
00:37:28,600 --> 00:37:32,600
It's an argument against betting your entire governance story on a single enforcement feature.

817
00:37:32,600 --> 00:37:37,280
The control-plane approach is to design DLP like a boundary layer with assumptions, where

818
00:37:37,280 --> 00:37:41,880
it's strong, where it's weak, and what compensating controls exist when it's weak.

819
00:37:41,880 --> 00:37:46,040
Identity decides who can attempt access, provisioning decides what can be created and where.

820
00:37:46,040 --> 00:37:50,000
DLP decides whether data pathways behave inside acceptable boundaries, and the principle

821
00:37:50,000 --> 00:37:53,640
that ties it together is the one most org's keep refusing to accept.

822
00:37:53,640 --> 00:37:55,480
Trust is engineered, not assumed.

823
00:37:55,480 --> 00:37:59,480
Now that the three control-plane components are defined, the next step is to make the

824
00:37:59,480 --> 00:38:04,120
shift real with the first case study, the PowerApp explosion, and what it looked like when

825
00:38:04,120 --> 00:38:09,080
governance moved from manual review to graph-driven life cycle by design.

826
00:38:09,080 --> 00:38:12,520
Case Study 1 setup PowerApp explosion.

827
00:38:12,520 --> 00:38:13,600
Governance through graph.

828
00:38:13,600 --> 00:38:18,000
The first case study starts the way the stories always start, with success.

829
00:38:18,000 --> 00:38:22,680
Power Platform landed, a few teams built a few useful apps, leadership saw quick wins,

830
00:38:22,680 --> 00:38:26,000
and the organization did the only thing it knows how to do with quick wins.

831
00:38:26,000 --> 00:38:28,680
It scaled them.

832
00:38:28,680 --> 00:38:32,800
Within a couple years, the tenant carried north of 3,000 apps and flows.

833
00:38:32,800 --> 00:38:37,080
Some were legitimate, well-built solutions, most were tactical utilities that outlived

834
00:38:37,080 --> 00:38:40,480
their moment, and the estate wasn't out of control in the dramatic sense.

835
00:38:40,480 --> 00:38:43,160
It was worse, it was undefined.

836
00:38:43,160 --> 00:38:47,600
10 people, what the app estate looked like, and you'd get 10 different answers.

837
00:38:47,600 --> 00:38:51,920
Because there was no system of record, there was no authoritative inventory with ownership,

838
00:38:51,920 --> 00:38:54,680
connector pathways, environments, and life cycle state.

839
00:38:54,680 --> 00:38:59,240
There were just scattered lists, a COE site that was always behind, and a general belief

840
00:38:59,240 --> 00:39:01,440
that we can always find it later.

841
00:39:01,440 --> 00:39:02,440
Later arrived.

842
00:39:02,440 --> 00:39:05,480
The first thing that broke wasn't security, it was support.

843
00:39:05,480 --> 00:39:09,480
Tickets started climbing, and not because apps were inherently fragile, tickets climbed

844
00:39:09,480 --> 00:39:12,360
because the tenant couldn't answer basic questions at speed.

845
00:39:12,360 --> 00:39:17,280
A flow failed, a team asked who owned it, and the answer required archaeology.

846
00:39:17,280 --> 00:39:21,880
Open the flow, check connections, find the maker, discover the maker left, escalate to

847
00:39:21,880 --> 00:39:26,360
admin, and then watch three different teams argue about whether this was a business app

848
00:39:26,360 --> 00:39:28,360
or IT owned.

849
00:39:28,360 --> 00:39:32,920
The queue filled up with identity and ownership problems disguised as app issues, and then

850
00:39:32,920 --> 00:39:36,920
the quiet killer showed up, departed employees as owners.

851
00:39:36,920 --> 00:39:40,440
When a maker leaves, the app doesn't stop existing, it just stops being maintainable

852
00:39:40,440 --> 00:39:42,320
by the people who depend on it.

853
00:39:42,320 --> 00:39:47,080
Action reference is age, secrets expire, API's throttle, licensing changes, and suddenly

854
00:39:47,080 --> 00:39:49,400
a business critical process has no steward.

855
00:39:49,400 --> 00:39:52,880
The platform didn't fail, the operating model failed to encode continuity.

856
00:39:52,880 --> 00:39:55,320
The second breaker was the default environment.

857
00:39:55,320 --> 00:39:56,880
Everything temporary lived there.

858
00:39:56,880 --> 00:40:01,720
Proof of concepts, side projects, team utilities, and then, predictably, the things that delivered

859
00:40:01,720 --> 00:40:03,560
value became dependencies.

860
00:40:03,560 --> 00:40:07,560
Nobody wanted to move them because moving implies governance and governance implies time.

861
00:40:07,560 --> 00:40:11,760
So the default environment became the production environment that nobody calls production.

862
00:40:11,760 --> 00:40:14,320
That's where DLP started to feel inconsistent.

863
00:40:14,320 --> 00:40:18,040
In some environments, connector policies were strict, in others exceptions piled up.

864
00:40:18,040 --> 00:40:21,600
In the default environment, the rules were whatever still works.

865
00:40:21,600 --> 00:40:25,800
People experienced DLP as arbitrary because enforcement differed across zones, and zones

866
00:40:25,800 --> 00:40:28,280
existed by accident, not by design.

867
00:40:28,280 --> 00:40:30,560
So makers learned the fastest pathway.

868
00:40:30,560 --> 00:40:34,800
Build where the policy is weakest, then ask for forgiveness when someone notices.

869
00:40:34,800 --> 00:40:35,800
Connector creep followed.

870
00:40:35,800 --> 00:40:38,800
A flow here used a consumer connector because it was convenient.

871
00:40:38,800 --> 00:40:42,920
An app there used a premium connector because it was just for this one team.

872
00:40:42,920 --> 00:40:47,040
Over time, connectors stopped being a technical choice and became a governance problem.

873
00:40:47,040 --> 00:40:52,120
Each connector created a new data pathway with audit obligations, licensing implications,

874
00:40:52,120 --> 00:40:55,160
and risk questions, nobody could answer quickly.

875
00:40:55,160 --> 00:40:57,320
The first audit scare made the problem visible.

876
00:40:57,320 --> 00:40:59,040
The auditors didn't ask for a philosophy.

877
00:40:59,040 --> 00:41:00,480
They asked for evidence.

878
00:41:00,480 --> 00:41:03,440
List the apps and flows that touch regulated data.

879
00:41:03,440 --> 00:41:05,600
Show owners, show connector usage.

880
00:41:05,600 --> 00:41:10,520
Show how DLP prevents unsafe pairing, show how levers don't leave behind active automations,

881
00:41:10,520 --> 00:41:13,920
show how exceptions are tracked, show how you retire unused assets.

882
00:41:13,920 --> 00:41:15,680
The organization had policies and documents.

883
00:41:15,680 --> 00:41:19,360
It did not have evidence at scale, so they did what enterprises do in that moment.

884
00:41:19,360 --> 00:41:21,440
They formed a task force and produced a binder.

885
00:41:21,440 --> 00:41:25,400
They passed the audit on heroics, and then they went right back to the same operating model

886
00:41:25,400 --> 00:41:26,960
that required heroics.

887
00:41:26,960 --> 00:41:29,720
At this stage, the executive misconception was predictable.

888
00:41:29,720 --> 00:41:31,200
We need more admins.

889
00:41:31,200 --> 00:41:33,800
That's the comforting answer because it sounds like capacity.

890
00:41:33,800 --> 00:41:34,800
It is not.

891
00:41:34,800 --> 00:41:39,440
It would have increased throughput temporarily, then failed permanently because the estate kept

892
00:41:39,440 --> 00:41:41,760
growing in the decision model state manual.

893
00:41:41,760 --> 00:41:46,560
The pivot came when someone finally asked the right question, why are humans the policy

894
00:41:46,560 --> 00:41:47,840
enforcement mechanism?

895
00:41:47,840 --> 00:41:51,920
Instead of adding reviewers, they started treating governance as an engineering problem,

896
00:41:51,920 --> 00:41:56,680
a control plane problem, and they anchored success on a metric executives actually understand,

897
00:41:56,680 --> 00:42:02,000
not number of apps governed, not percentage of makers trained, not DLP policies created,

898
00:42:02,000 --> 00:42:03,600
support tickets.

899
00:42:03,600 --> 00:42:08,960
They defined a governance related ticket category, ownership changes, access requests, connector

900
00:42:08,960 --> 00:42:15,080
exceptions, DLP blocks, environment drift, broken connections caused by life cycle decay,

901
00:42:15,080 --> 00:42:17,720
then they measured baseline volume and cycle time.

902
00:42:17,720 --> 00:42:21,960
That number became the truth theorem because it captured friction from every missing control.

903
00:42:21,960 --> 00:42:23,240
The target was simple.

904
00:42:23,240 --> 00:42:27,840
Cut that ticket volume by around 40% without slowing down delivery.

905
00:42:27,840 --> 00:42:32,040
Not by policing makers harder, by changing how the tenant creates, owns, classifies, and

906
00:42:32,040 --> 00:42:34,560
retires assets by design.

907
00:42:34,560 --> 00:42:37,600
Now the important part, the shift wasn't used Microsoft Graph.

908
00:42:37,600 --> 00:42:41,400
The shift was to govern through Graph, meaning the control plane could create inventory,

909
00:42:41,400 --> 00:42:44,480
enforce ownership, and drive life cycle outcomes automatically.

910
00:42:44,480 --> 00:42:46,280
At the moment, assets are born.

911
00:42:46,280 --> 00:42:47,840
That's what will walk through next.

912
00:42:47,840 --> 00:42:50,800
The control plane shift, not the tool list.

913
00:42:50,800 --> 00:42:54,360
Case study one, control plane shift, life cycle by design.

914
00:42:54,360 --> 00:42:55,960
They didn't clean up apps.

915
00:42:55,960 --> 00:42:57,360
They changed the birth mechanism.

916
00:42:57,360 --> 00:42:59,240
That's the control plane move.

917
00:42:59,240 --> 00:43:03,160
Stop treating creation as a personal act in a maker studio and start treating it as a

918
00:43:03,160 --> 00:43:05,520
governed pathway within force defaults.

919
00:43:05,520 --> 00:43:06,960
The estate didn't need more training.

920
00:43:06,960 --> 00:43:11,080
It needed fewer degrees of freedom in the places that create irreversible mess.

921
00:43:11,080 --> 00:43:15,640
So the first change was graph-based provisioning, but not in the shallow we used in API sense.

922
00:43:15,640 --> 00:43:17,880
They defined standard creation pathways.

923
00:43:17,880 --> 00:43:21,920
If you wanted a production-capable app or flow, you didn't start in the default environment

924
00:43:21,920 --> 00:43:23,080
and hope for the best.

925
00:43:23,080 --> 00:43:26,760
You requested a governed artifact, and the control plane created it with pre-attached

926
00:43:26,760 --> 00:43:27,760
metadata.

927
00:43:27,760 --> 00:43:32,880
Owner, business purpose, environment classification, connector tier, data sensitivity expectation,

928
00:43:32,880 --> 00:43:36,760
support model, all written at creation time, because anything not captured at creation

929
00:43:36,760 --> 00:43:38,480
time becomes a myth later.

930
00:43:38,480 --> 00:43:42,280
Microsoft Graph became the plumbing for the life cycle objects that matter.

931
00:43:42,280 --> 00:43:47,040
App registrations, groups, ownership links, and the inventory that ties these to power platform

932
00:43:47,040 --> 00:43:48,040
assets.

933
00:43:48,040 --> 00:43:49,360
The point wasn't to manage every click.

934
00:43:49,360 --> 00:43:52,920
The point was to make the tenant produce a reliable ledger of what exists.

935
00:43:52,920 --> 00:43:55,720
Then they enforced ownership continuity as a hard rule.

936
00:43:55,720 --> 00:43:57,120
No single human owners.

937
00:43:57,120 --> 00:44:02,360
However, every critical app and flow required at least two human co-owners plus a continuity

938
00:44:02,360 --> 00:44:08,760
identity that survives org charts, a service account or team-owned group with controlled membership.

939
00:44:08,760 --> 00:44:10,240
Not as a best practice.

940
00:44:10,240 --> 00:44:14,680
As a creation gate, if the ownership graph wasn't complete, the artifact didn't get created

941
00:44:14,680 --> 00:44:16,040
in the governed zone.

942
00:44:16,040 --> 00:44:18,560
This one will remove an entire class of tickets.

943
00:44:18,560 --> 00:44:23,240
Not because it prevented people leaving, but because it prevented levers from becoming outages.

944
00:44:23,240 --> 00:44:27,960
This came automated retirement, and this is where most orgs flinch because they're emotionally

945
00:44:27,960 --> 00:44:30,720
attached to the idea that deletion is dangerous.

946
00:44:30,720 --> 00:44:31,720
It is.

947
00:44:31,720 --> 00:44:35,640
But unmanaged permanence is worse, so they engineered retirement like a life cycle product.

948
00:44:35,640 --> 00:44:40,040
Inactivity thresholds, staged notifications and deletion gates with quarantine pathways.

949
00:44:40,040 --> 00:44:44,080
If an app hadn't been used or modified in a defined period, the control plane marked

950
00:44:44,080 --> 00:44:45,600
it as candidate.

951
00:44:45,600 --> 00:44:47,240
Owners got notices with a simple choice.

952
00:44:47,240 --> 00:44:50,840
A test did still need it, assign a new owner, or accept the application.

953
00:44:50,840 --> 00:44:53,200
No response didn't mean keep forever.

954
00:44:53,200 --> 00:44:57,280
No response meant move toward retirement because silence is not governance.

955
00:44:57,280 --> 00:45:01,440
And for flows, they used run history and failure patterns as signals.

956
00:45:01,440 --> 00:45:03,120
Dead flows weren't legacy.

957
00:45:03,120 --> 00:45:04,560
They were liabilities.

958
00:45:04,560 --> 00:45:08,560
The control plane treated repeated failures, broken connections, and missing owners as

959
00:45:08,560 --> 00:45:12,160
risk indicators that triggered intervention automatically.

960
00:45:12,160 --> 00:45:15,920
DLP moved from policing to gates instead of waiting for makers to discover that a policy

961
00:45:15,920 --> 00:45:18,200
blocks them after they've already built the thing.

962
00:45:18,200 --> 00:45:23,000
The control plane applied DLP at creation based on environment classification.

963
00:45:23,000 --> 00:45:28,080
Green zone, permissive connector set for exploration with clear warnings and limited data scope.

964
00:45:28,080 --> 00:45:32,040
Yellow zone, approved business connectors only with tighter sharing rules.

965
00:45:32,040 --> 00:45:37,080
Red zone, strict allow lists, premium connector restrictions, and stronger auditing expectations.

966
00:45:37,080 --> 00:45:39,520
That zoning strategy did something important.

967
00:45:39,520 --> 00:45:43,480
It made where you build a security decision, not a convenience decision.

968
00:45:43,480 --> 00:45:48,440
And it made DLP feel consistent again, because enforcement mapped to explicit zones instead

969
00:45:48,440 --> 00:45:50,040
of accidental environments.

970
00:45:50,040 --> 00:45:53,560
After governance followed the same logic, connectors weren't treated as features.

971
00:45:53,560 --> 00:45:57,440
They were treated as data pathways with cost and audit obligations.

972
00:45:57,440 --> 00:46:01,720
High risk connectors required an engineered exception workflow, request, justification, time

973
00:46:01,720 --> 00:46:04,240
bound approval, and automatic review.

974
00:46:04,240 --> 00:46:06,480
No more email and admin and hope.

975
00:46:06,480 --> 00:46:10,840
Exceptions became a formal part of the control plane, because unstructured exceptions are how

976
00:46:10,840 --> 00:46:12,640
policy becomes theater.

977
00:46:12,640 --> 00:46:16,680
Then they automated evidence production which is the part executives never believe is possible

978
00:46:16,680 --> 00:46:18,240
until it's done.

979
00:46:18,240 --> 00:46:21,960
They became continuous, not quarterly, not when audit asks.

980
00:46:21,960 --> 00:46:22,960
Continuous.

981
00:46:22,960 --> 00:46:27,200
They generated a tenant level view of assets with the fields, auditors, and incident responders

982
00:46:27,200 --> 00:46:28,680
actually need.

983
00:46:28,680 --> 00:46:33,400
Asset type environment owners, connectors, last run, last modified sharing scope, and a simple

984
00:46:33,400 --> 00:46:34,400
risk tier.

985
00:46:34,400 --> 00:46:36,360
They didn't pretend risk scoring was perfect.

986
00:46:36,360 --> 00:46:37,520
They made it legible.

987
00:46:37,520 --> 00:46:40,240
And because it was legible, they could root attention correctly.

988
00:46:40,240 --> 00:46:42,560
Red tier assets got tighter review and monitoring.

989
00:46:42,560 --> 00:46:46,280
Green tier experiments got freedom without pretending they were production safe.

990
00:46:46,280 --> 00:46:48,120
The outcome wasn't a cleaner spreadsheet.

991
00:46:48,120 --> 00:46:49,520
It was change system behavior.

992
00:46:49,520 --> 00:46:50,520
Makeers still built.

993
00:46:50,520 --> 00:46:55,200
But they built through pathways that produced ownership, boundaries, and life cycle by default.

994
00:46:55,200 --> 00:46:58,760
Admin stopped acting as human control planes because the control plane started doing what

995
00:46:58,760 --> 00:47:02,120
systems are supposed to do, enforce assumptions automatically.

996
00:47:02,120 --> 00:47:04,800
This is the part that matters for the next case study sections.

997
00:47:04,800 --> 00:47:06,880
They didn't win by centralizing everything.

998
00:47:06,880 --> 00:47:11,240
They won by standardizing the rules of creation and by making the cost of bypassing those rules

999
00:47:11,240 --> 00:47:13,120
higher than the cost of doing it right.

1000
00:47:13,120 --> 00:47:16,200
And once life cycle became design, not cleanup.

1001
00:47:16,200 --> 00:47:19,120
The ticket curve finally had a reason to bend.

1002
00:47:19,120 --> 00:47:20,360
Case study one.

1003
00:47:20,360 --> 00:47:21,360
Outcomes.

1004
00:47:21,360 --> 00:47:22,760
What changed system behavior?

1005
00:47:22,760 --> 00:47:24,920
Here's what changed after the control plane shift.

1006
00:47:24,920 --> 00:47:28,800
Not the number of apps, not the maker enthusiasm, not the amount of innovation.

1007
00:47:28,800 --> 00:47:30,160
System behavior changed.

1008
00:47:30,160 --> 00:47:33,840
And that's the only thing worth measuring because outputs are easy to fake.

1009
00:47:33,840 --> 00:47:34,840
Behavior is not.

1010
00:47:34,840 --> 00:47:37,280
The headline metric was support tickets.

1011
00:47:37,280 --> 00:47:39,800
Governance related tickets dropped by 41%.

1012
00:47:39,800 --> 00:47:41,960
Not because users suddenly became experts.

1013
00:47:41,960 --> 00:47:44,040
Not because admins worked harder.

1014
00:47:44,040 --> 00:47:48,560
With the tenant stopped generating ambiguity by default, ownership stopped being a mystery.

1015
00:47:48,560 --> 00:47:51,240
So who owns this tickets evaporated?

1016
00:47:51,240 --> 00:47:52,960
Creation stopped happening in random places.

1017
00:47:52,960 --> 00:47:55,440
So why is this blocked here but not there?

1018
00:47:55,440 --> 00:47:57,400
Tickets stopped being a weekly argument.

1019
00:47:57,400 --> 00:47:59,320
Connectors stopped being surprised data pathways.

1020
00:47:59,320 --> 00:48:02,720
So we didn't know this flow was exporting data to that service.

1021
00:48:02,720 --> 00:48:05,560
Stop showing up as panic disguised as troubleshooting.

1022
00:48:05,560 --> 00:48:08,480
The system started answering the basic questions for them.

1023
00:48:08,480 --> 00:48:09,960
That's what a control plane does.

1024
00:48:09,960 --> 00:48:12,840
It turns questions into queries, not investigations.

1025
00:48:12,840 --> 00:48:15,760
The second measurable change was audit evidence production.

1026
00:48:15,760 --> 00:48:19,800
They measured it in a lap's time, not in how confident the compliance team felt.

1027
00:48:19,800 --> 00:48:21,680
Evidence production got 60% faster.

1028
00:48:21,680 --> 00:48:23,080
That number isn't magical.

1029
00:48:23,080 --> 00:48:25,000
It's mechanical.

1030
00:48:25,000 --> 00:48:28,080
Before, evidence required assembling fragments.

1031
00:48:28,080 --> 00:48:32,840
Portal exports, screenshots, emails, and someone's memory of why an exception existed.

1032
00:48:32,840 --> 00:48:36,800
After evidence was a byproduct of operating the system, inventory existed, ownership was

1033
00:48:36,800 --> 00:48:37,960
enforced.

1034
00:48:37,960 --> 00:48:39,840
Connector use was visible.

1035
00:48:39,840 --> 00:48:42,920
Auditors were classified and retirement signals were recorded.

1036
00:48:42,920 --> 00:48:44,400
Auditors didn't become nicer.

1037
00:48:44,400 --> 00:48:47,680
The organization just stopped treating audits like an annual scavenger hunt.

1038
00:48:47,680 --> 00:48:49,480
The third change was unused assets.

1039
00:48:49,480 --> 00:48:52,520
They saw a 28% reduction in unused apps.

1040
00:48:52,520 --> 00:48:54,760
Not because someone finally found time to clean up.

1041
00:48:54,760 --> 00:48:57,640
Because retirement became default behavior, that's the deeper outcome.

1042
00:48:57,640 --> 00:49:00,520
The estate stopped growing purely by accumulation.

1043
00:49:00,520 --> 00:49:03,440
It started shrinking where value didn't exist anymore.

1044
00:49:03,440 --> 00:49:06,800
And that matters because in a state that can't shrink is not in a state.

1045
00:49:06,800 --> 00:49:08,200
It's a landfill with a UI.

1046
00:49:08,200 --> 00:49:11,640
Now if you're listening and thinking, "Okay, so they got lucky, good."

1047
00:49:11,640 --> 00:49:12,920
That skepticism is healthy.

1048
00:49:12,920 --> 00:49:14,400
This is correlation, not physics.

1049
00:49:14,400 --> 00:49:17,200
But the architecture created the conditions for those outcomes.

1050
00:49:17,200 --> 00:49:19,320
And that's the distinction most exact, exact, ignored.

1051
00:49:19,320 --> 00:49:21,280
You don't buy a 41% reduction.

1052
00:49:21,280 --> 00:49:25,200
You build a system where the same class of failure can't reproduce at scale.

1053
00:49:25,200 --> 00:49:26,960
What actually improved was determinism.

1054
00:49:26,960 --> 00:49:30,360
Before, the tenant behaved like a probabilistic system.

1055
00:49:30,360 --> 00:49:32,480
Outcomes depended on which admin you got.

1056
00:49:32,480 --> 00:49:34,320
Which exception someone remembered.

1057
00:49:34,320 --> 00:49:36,280
Which environment a maker happened to use.

1058
00:49:36,280 --> 00:49:38,840
And whether the original owner still existed.

1059
00:49:38,840 --> 00:49:41,840
The same action could produce different results on different days.

1060
00:49:41,840 --> 00:49:42,840
That's not governance.

1061
00:49:42,840 --> 00:49:45,160
That's roulette with compliance penalties.

1062
00:49:45,160 --> 00:49:48,760
After the control plane shift, outcomes became predictable.

1063
00:49:48,760 --> 00:49:50,880
Production assets were born in known zones.

1064
00:49:50,880 --> 00:49:53,560
Within forced ownership, known connector boundaries.

1065
00:49:53,560 --> 00:49:57,520
And life cycle hooks that triggered retirement and evidence generation.

1066
00:49:57,520 --> 00:49:59,920
Accountability became durable.

1067
00:49:59,920 --> 00:50:01,960
Not we think Bob owns it.

1068
00:50:01,960 --> 00:50:05,840
Actual owner links that survive org charts because co-ownership and continuity identities

1069
00:50:05,840 --> 00:50:06,840
were mandatory.

1070
00:50:06,840 --> 00:50:10,120
That single design choice shrank the blast radius of departures.

1071
00:50:10,120 --> 00:50:11,120
People still left.

1072
00:50:11,120 --> 00:50:12,720
The tenant stopped caring.

1073
00:50:12,720 --> 00:50:14,240
Auditability became cheap.

1074
00:50:14,240 --> 00:50:15,240
Not free.

1075
00:50:15,240 --> 00:50:16,240
Cheap.

1076
00:50:16,240 --> 00:50:19,280
Because the estate produced its own ledger continuously, you could ask questions like show

1077
00:50:19,280 --> 00:50:24,480
me all flows in red zones using premium connectors with no successful run in 30 days and no continuity

1078
00:50:24,480 --> 00:50:25,480
owner.

1079
00:50:25,480 --> 00:50:26,480
That's not a meeting.

1080
00:50:26,480 --> 00:50:27,480
That's a filter.

1081
00:50:27,480 --> 00:50:29,440
And the most important cultural shift.

1082
00:50:29,440 --> 00:50:30,960
Admin stopped being the hot path.

1083
00:50:30,960 --> 00:50:31,960
They still existed.

1084
00:50:31,960 --> 00:50:32,960
They still governed.

1085
00:50:32,960 --> 00:50:35,400
But they stopped being required for every correction.

1086
00:50:35,400 --> 00:50:38,560
The system stopped demanding attention for routine life cycle work.

1087
00:50:38,560 --> 00:50:39,560
That's the win.

1088
00:50:39,560 --> 00:50:42,240
Because at enterprise scale attention is the rarest resource.

1089
00:50:42,240 --> 00:50:43,240
Not licenses.

1090
00:50:43,240 --> 00:50:44,240
Not connectors.

1091
00:50:44,240 --> 00:50:45,240
Not templates.

1092
00:50:45,240 --> 00:50:46,240
Attention.

1093
00:50:46,240 --> 00:50:49,600
Now the story has to move beyond power platform and M365.

1094
00:50:49,600 --> 00:50:53,080
Because the same failure mode exists in Azure just with different nouns.

1095
00:50:53,080 --> 00:50:55,280
Power apps sprawl become subscription sprawl.

1096
00:50:55,280 --> 00:50:56,960
Makers become workload owners.

1097
00:50:56,960 --> 00:50:59,360
Connectors become role assignments and policies.

1098
00:50:59,360 --> 00:51:00,960
And the same question returns.

1099
00:51:00,960 --> 00:51:02,440
Are you governing outputs?

1100
00:51:02,440 --> 00:51:06,280
Are you engineering the control plane that makes those outputs safe by default?

1101
00:51:06,280 --> 00:51:08,280
Case study to set up.

1102
00:51:08,280 --> 00:51:12,840
Azure policy chaos identity driven guardrails.

1103
00:51:12,840 --> 00:51:16,480
The second case study looks like a completely different problem.

1104
00:51:16,480 --> 00:51:19,840
Different teams, different portal, different vocabulary, same failure mode.

1105
00:51:19,840 --> 00:51:24,480
It started with cloud adoption, which is corporate speak for we created subscriptions faster

1106
00:51:24,480 --> 00:51:26,800
than we created a way to govern them.

1107
00:51:26,800 --> 00:51:29,600
Over time, the estate grew into hundreds of subscriptions.

1108
00:51:29,600 --> 00:51:33,760
Some mapped cleanly to business units, some mapped to projects, some mapped to experiments

1109
00:51:33,760 --> 00:51:36,920
that became production because nobody wanted to do the migration paperwork.

1110
00:51:36,920 --> 00:51:40,840
And because every subscription came with its own R-back graph, its own policy assignments

1111
00:51:40,840 --> 00:51:43,400
and its own set of exceptions, governance didn't scale.

1112
00:51:43,400 --> 00:51:44,600
It fragmented.

1113
00:51:44,600 --> 00:51:48,840
At first it felt manageable, a few Azure policies, a few naming standards, a few mandatory

1114
00:51:48,840 --> 00:51:50,040
tags.

1115
00:51:50,040 --> 00:51:52,080
And then reality arrived.

1116
00:51:52,080 --> 00:51:56,240
Engineers needed speed, security needed guardrails and finance wanted cost attribution

1117
00:51:56,240 --> 00:51:57,240
yesterday.

1118
00:51:57,240 --> 00:51:59,360
So exceptions became the only thing that moved quickly.

1119
00:51:59,360 --> 00:52:03,920
This is the foundational mistake treating Azure policy as paperwork as your policy is enforcement.

1120
00:52:03,920 --> 00:52:08,720
But when it's implemented like documentation written once, rarely tested and constantly

1121
00:52:08,720 --> 00:52:13,280
bypassed, it becomes an artifact of intent, not a mechanism of control.

1122
00:52:13,280 --> 00:52:16,640
And that's when the environment flips from deterministic to probabilistic.

1123
00:52:16,640 --> 00:52:20,440
The rules exist, but outcomes depend on who deployed the resource, which template they

1124
00:52:20,440 --> 00:52:23,160
used and whether anyone noticed the exception.

1125
00:52:23,160 --> 00:52:25,280
The first visible symptom was R-back drift.

1126
00:52:25,280 --> 00:52:30,360
Groups got assigned for emergencies, owners got added temporarily to unblock pipelines.

1127
00:52:30,360 --> 00:52:34,160
Custom roles appeared because someone didn't want to learn the built-in ones.

1128
00:52:34,160 --> 00:52:37,360
Groups got repurposed because it was faster than requesting a new one.

1129
00:52:37,360 --> 00:52:41,800
And nobody had a reliable answer to the simplest question, who can do what right now across

1130
00:52:41,800 --> 00:52:43,240
the estate?

1131
00:52:43,240 --> 00:52:46,160
Then came the quietest high-risk asset class in Azure.

1132
00:52:46,160 --> 00:52:49,920
Often service principles, service principles don't complain, they don't submit tickets,

1133
00:52:49,920 --> 00:52:52,920
they don't leave the company, they just keep working with whatever permissions they were

1134
00:52:52,920 --> 00:52:55,640
granted at the moment someone needed something to run.

1135
00:52:55,640 --> 00:52:59,840
Over time, the directory accumulated workload identities with broad rights, unknown owners

1136
00:52:59,840 --> 00:53:02,960
and credentials that rotated only when something broke.

1137
00:53:02,960 --> 00:53:07,000
Some of them held API permissions, some held subscription owners, some held rights to key

1138
00:53:07,000 --> 00:53:08,480
vaults and automation accounts.

1139
00:53:08,480 --> 00:53:12,880
And because they were created as implementation details, nobody treated them as govern principles,

1140
00:53:12,880 --> 00:53:13,920
that is always how it goes.

1141
00:53:13,920 --> 00:53:17,360
The second symptom was tagging and naming inconsistency.

1142
00:53:17,360 --> 00:53:20,360
This sounds petty until you run a FinOps review or an incident.

1143
00:53:20,360 --> 00:53:24,920
These resources aren't tagged consistently, cost attribution becomes political theatre.

1144
00:53:24,920 --> 00:53:26,840
Every spend report becomes a negotiation.

1145
00:53:26,840 --> 00:53:31,440
If naming isn't consistent, incident response becomes slower because responders can't tell

1146
00:53:31,440 --> 00:53:35,520
what a resource is for, who owns it, or whether it's safe to isolate.

1147
00:53:35,520 --> 00:53:40,080
The organization loses visibility and then tries to buy visibility back with another tool.

1148
00:53:40,080 --> 00:53:41,640
And then audit pain arrived.

1149
00:53:41,640 --> 00:53:43,440
Not we failed an audit pain.

1150
00:53:43,440 --> 00:53:48,320
Worse, we can't answer basic audit questions without assembling a team pain.

1151
00:53:48,320 --> 00:53:50,040
Evidence lived in too many places.

1152
00:53:50,040 --> 00:53:54,880
As your portal exports, defender alerts, random spreadsheets, tribal knowledge and screenshots

1153
00:53:54,880 --> 00:53:58,720
saved in teams chats that nobody can find during an audit.

1154
00:53:58,720 --> 00:54:03,680
The auditors weren't asking for perfection, they were asking for control proof, access governance,

1155
00:54:03,680 --> 00:54:07,040
exception handling, policy coverage and remediation evidence.

1156
00:54:07,040 --> 00:54:10,800
And the organization could only answer with heroics, that means they didn't have a system,

1157
00:54:10,800 --> 00:54:11,800
they had people.

1158
00:54:11,800 --> 00:54:15,080
Now here's the trap that kept this estate stuck for years.

1159
00:54:15,080 --> 00:54:18,880
They tried to govern resources directly, they tried to review every subscription, every

1160
00:54:18,880 --> 00:54:22,760
resource group, every policy assignment, every exception, every role assignment.

1161
00:54:22,760 --> 00:54:25,000
That sounds responsible until you do the math.

1162
00:54:25,000 --> 00:54:29,320
At hundreds of subscriptions and thousands of resources, human review becomes a denial

1163
00:54:29,320 --> 00:54:31,480
of service against governance itself.

1164
00:54:31,480 --> 00:54:36,400
So the organization did what humans do, they prioritized the loudest problems and the quiet

1165
00:54:36,400 --> 00:54:42,200
problems, service principles, inherited permissions, stale role assignments, kept accumulating.

1166
00:54:42,200 --> 00:54:43,680
This is the uncomfortable truth.

1167
00:54:43,680 --> 00:54:47,720
Azure resource governance fails when identity governance is weak.

1168
00:54:47,720 --> 00:54:52,200
Because Azure policy can constrain configurations, but it doesn't fix who is allowed to bypass

1169
00:54:52,200 --> 00:54:53,200
the constraints.

1170
00:54:53,200 --> 00:54:57,920
Our back defines the bypass paths, workload identities and admins define the blast radius.

1171
00:54:57,920 --> 00:55:01,400
If you don't govern the principles, your policy engine becomes advisory.

1172
00:55:01,400 --> 00:55:05,200
The pivot point in this case study was when they stopped asking, how do we review more?

1173
00:55:05,200 --> 00:55:08,600
And started asking, how do we remove review from the hot path?

1174
00:55:08,600 --> 00:55:13,320
They reframed the system around identity driven guardrails, govern workload identities,

1175
00:55:13,320 --> 00:55:18,240
standardize provisioning patterns and make exceptions explicit, time bound and observable,

1176
00:55:18,240 --> 00:55:19,840
not because it's cleaner.

1177
00:55:19,840 --> 00:55:23,400
Because at this scale, it's the only model that behaves predictably.

1178
00:55:23,400 --> 00:55:27,840
Case study, two control plane shift, blueprinted provisioning plus conditional enforcement.

1179
00:55:27,840 --> 00:55:30,960
So they stopped trying to fix Azure by reviewing Azure.

1180
00:55:30,960 --> 00:55:33,560
They rebuilt the upstream system that creates Azure.

1181
00:55:33,560 --> 00:55:36,520
The first move was identity standards for workloads.

1182
00:55:36,520 --> 00:55:39,280
Not we should use managed identities as a suggestion.

1183
00:55:39,280 --> 00:55:44,040
Real standard, every workload identity needed an owner, a purpose and a life cycle.

1184
00:55:44,040 --> 00:55:47,280
If it couldn't be tied to a team and a service, it didn't get created.

1185
00:55:47,280 --> 00:55:50,840
If it didn't have a rotation and review story, it didn't ship.

1186
00:55:50,840 --> 00:55:54,520
They treated service principles as production infrastructure because that's what they are.

1187
00:55:54,520 --> 00:55:58,040
Then they drew role boundaries like they expected abuse, not like they expected everyone

1188
00:55:58,040 --> 00:55:59,680
to be well behaved.

1189
00:55:59,680 --> 00:56:02,680
Subscription owner became a rare time bound role.

1190
00:56:02,680 --> 00:56:04,160
Contributor stopped being the default.

1191
00:56:04,160 --> 00:56:07,760
Custom roles weren't banned, but they were treated as an exception pathway with review and

1192
00:56:07,760 --> 00:56:08,760
expiry.

1193
00:56:08,760 --> 00:56:10,920
Access reviews weren't calendar theater either.

1194
00:56:10,920 --> 00:56:14,880
They were tied to workload identity ownership and real usage, so still Grants got revoked

1195
00:56:14,880 --> 00:56:16,600
without a committee meeting.

1196
00:56:16,600 --> 00:56:19,840
And they attacked the quiet time bomb, often service principles.

1197
00:56:19,840 --> 00:56:21,440
They didn't do it by scanning once.

1198
00:56:21,440 --> 00:56:23,440
They made often structurally harder.

1199
00:56:23,440 --> 00:56:28,000
Every new app registration required enforced ownership links and a continuity group.

1200
00:56:28,000 --> 00:56:31,160
Every credential had to be rotated through a controlled process.

1201
00:56:31,160 --> 00:56:34,880
And if a principle had no owner, it got quarantined into a remediation workflow.

1202
00:56:34,880 --> 00:56:38,040
Not disabled immediately because production is messy.

1203
00:56:38,040 --> 00:56:41,080
And visibility, time box and consequences.

1204
00:56:41,080 --> 00:56:42,800
Next came conditional access.

1205
00:56:42,800 --> 00:56:46,400
And this is where the story gets uncomfortable for people who still think CA is only about

1206
00:56:46,400 --> 00:56:47,400
users.

1207
00:56:47,400 --> 00:56:51,160
They began applying CA more deliberately to admin pathways and privileged access because

1208
00:56:51,160 --> 00:56:53,920
the bypass routes were the actual governance problem.

1209
00:56:53,920 --> 00:56:57,640
They didn't promise CA could solve every workload identity issue.

1210
00:56:57,640 --> 00:56:58,640
It can't.

1211
00:56:58,640 --> 00:57:03,600
But it can shrink the uncontrolled routes humans used to change the tenant, unmanaged devices,

1212
00:57:03,600 --> 00:57:06,320
legacy oath and casual elevation.

1213
00:57:06,320 --> 00:57:10,080
They aligned CA policies to the identity standards they just defined.

1214
00:57:10,080 --> 00:57:13,840
And they treated CA changes like code, scope, tested and versioned.

1215
00:57:13,840 --> 00:57:17,920
No more policy piles, no more permanent exclusions because the build agent broke once.

1216
00:57:17,920 --> 00:57:21,280
Then they moved policy enforcement upstream into provisioning.

1217
00:57:21,280 --> 00:57:23,640
This is where the blueprinted provisioning shift happened.

1218
00:57:23,640 --> 00:57:27,520
They stopped letting teams create subscriptions as artisanal snowflakes.

1219
00:57:27,520 --> 00:57:31,680
Subscription creation became a controlled pattern, a blueprint that included naming, mandatory

1220
00:57:31,680 --> 00:57:36,640
tags, baseline policies, diagnostic settings, logging destinations and RBAC scaffolding.

1221
00:57:36,640 --> 00:57:40,520
Not because templates are pretty, because templates are enforceable intent.

1222
00:57:40,520 --> 00:57:43,520
Provisioning created the subscription with the guardrails already attached.

1223
00:57:43,520 --> 00:57:47,280
If a workload needed an exception, the exception wasn't a side conversation.

1224
00:57:47,280 --> 00:57:52,760
It was a declared input into the provisioning workflow, time bound, logged and reviewable.

1225
00:57:52,760 --> 00:57:54,320
Exception stopped being invisible.

1226
00:57:54,320 --> 00:57:57,600
They became first class objects with owners and expiry dates.

1227
00:57:57,600 --> 00:57:59,760
Tagging enforcement followed the same design rule.

1228
00:57:59,760 --> 00:58:03,160
The finance and security both need tags, tags can't be optional.

1229
00:58:03,160 --> 00:58:09,120
They used policy as code thinking, required tags at creation, auto remediation where possible,

1230
00:58:09,120 --> 00:58:12,920
and an engineered exception path where auto remediation couldn't work.

1231
00:58:12,920 --> 00:58:16,880
That mattered because it eliminated the will fix tags later lie.

1232
00:58:16,880 --> 00:58:18,280
Later is where visibility dies.

1233
00:58:18,280 --> 00:58:21,440
They also built life cycle automation into access itself.

1234
00:58:21,440 --> 00:58:22,840
Roads didn't live forever.

1235
00:58:22,840 --> 00:58:25,040
Privileged grants expired by default.

1236
00:58:25,040 --> 00:58:26,760
Credentials rotated on schedule.

1237
00:58:26,760 --> 00:58:29,280
Local identities got flagged when they stopped being used.

1238
00:58:29,280 --> 00:58:32,080
Not as a quarterly review, as a continuous hygiene loop.

1239
00:58:32,080 --> 00:58:35,440
And they finally treated drift as telemetry, not as a surprise.

1240
00:58:35,440 --> 00:58:39,360
If someone assigned an out-of-policy role, that wasn't someone made a mistake.

1241
00:58:39,360 --> 00:58:40,640
That was a control plane signal.

1242
00:58:40,640 --> 00:58:43,880
The system recorded it, rooted it and forced a decision.

1243
00:58:43,880 --> 00:58:46,400
Justify, remediate or revoke.

1244
00:58:46,400 --> 00:58:47,840
Governance stopped being a spreadsheet.

1245
00:58:47,840 --> 00:58:49,720
It became an event stream.

1246
00:58:49,720 --> 00:58:54,000
Now it's worth saying out loud, none of this required them to centralize every engineering

1247
00:58:54,000 --> 00:58:55,000
decision.

1248
00:58:55,000 --> 00:58:56,280
And still deployed resources.

1249
00:58:56,280 --> 00:58:57,680
They still chose architectures.

1250
00:58:57,680 --> 00:58:59,760
The control plane didn't design their applications.

1251
00:58:59,760 --> 00:59:01,120
It designed their boundaries.

1252
00:59:01,120 --> 00:59:03,480
That's the separation that makes this work at scale.

1253
00:59:03,480 --> 00:59:06,760
The data plane stays flexible, but the control plane stays deterministic.

1254
00:59:06,760 --> 00:59:08,280
And yes, they still had exceptions.

1255
00:59:08,280 --> 00:59:11,440
They just stopped pretending exceptions were temporary without engineering.

1256
00:59:11,440 --> 00:59:15,080
Every exception had an owner, an expiry, an evidence.

1257
00:59:15,080 --> 00:59:17,800
Because an exception without those three things is not flexibility.

1258
00:59:17,800 --> 00:59:18,800
It's erosion.

1259
00:59:18,800 --> 00:59:23,440
So by the time a subscription existed, it already had identity guardrails, policy baselines,

1260
00:59:23,440 --> 00:59:25,640
logging, tagging and unknown authority chain.

1261
00:59:25,640 --> 00:59:28,320
When auditors asked, how do you ensure consistency?

1262
00:59:28,320 --> 00:59:29,960
The answer wasn't, we try.

1263
00:59:29,960 --> 00:59:32,920
The answer was, we don't allow inconsistent creation.

1264
00:59:32,920 --> 00:59:35,520
And when an incident happened, they didn't start with discovery.

1265
00:59:35,520 --> 00:59:36,920
They started with inventories.

1266
00:59:36,920 --> 00:59:40,600
That's the whole point of blueprinted provisioning plus conditional enforcement.

1267
00:59:40,600 --> 00:59:44,680
Governance moves upstream and the runtime stops paying for ambiguity.

1268
00:59:44,680 --> 00:59:48,800
Case study two outcomes, reduced drift, reduced spend, cleaner audits.

1269
00:59:48,800 --> 00:59:53,000
The outcomes in this Azure case weren't better documentation or more alignment meetings.

1270
00:59:53,440 --> 00:59:57,480
The outcomes were mechanical changes in drift, spend and audit behavior

1271
00:59:57,480 --> 00:59:59,440
because the control plane moved upstream.

1272
00:59:59,440 --> 01:00:01,640
First, misconfiguration dropped.

1273
01:00:01,640 --> 01:00:05,200
They measured it as the count of non-compliant environments and policy violations

1274
01:00:05,200 --> 01:00:07,080
that required manual remediation.

1275
01:00:07,080 --> 01:00:08,680
That number fell by 35%.

1276
01:00:08,680 --> 01:00:11,200
And the reason wasn't that engineers suddenly cared more.

1277
01:00:11,200 --> 01:00:13,360
It's that variation stopped being a creative act.

1278
01:00:13,360 --> 01:00:15,920
When subscription creation moved to a blueprint pathway

1279
01:00:15,920 --> 01:00:18,360
and when identity guardrails shipped at birth,

1280
01:00:18,360 --> 01:00:22,120
a large category of mistakes stopped being possible, not less likely.

1281
01:00:22,120 --> 01:00:25,200
Not caught faster, not possible inside the governed path.

1282
01:00:25,200 --> 01:00:28,800
The estate became boring in the best way.

1283
01:00:28,800 --> 01:00:34,880
Same baselines, same diagnostics, same tags, same RBAC scaffolding, same exception model.

1284
01:00:34,880 --> 01:00:37,360
Drift didn't disappear, drift became legible.

1285
01:00:37,360 --> 01:00:39,240
If someone made an out-of-policy assignment,

1286
01:00:39,240 --> 01:00:42,600
it showed up as a control plane signal with an owner and an expiry path.

1287
01:00:42,600 --> 01:00:45,360
Instead of teams arguing about intent after the fact,

1288
01:00:45,360 --> 01:00:48,960
the system forced the choice while the context still existed,

1289
01:00:48,960 --> 01:00:52,640
justify it, remediate it, or revoke it.

1290
01:00:52,640 --> 01:00:56,960
That single shift, turning drift into an event, not a surprise,

1291
01:00:56,960 --> 01:00:58,880
change the entire operating posture.

1292
01:00:58,880 --> 01:01:00,680
Second, clouds bend, dropped.

1293
01:01:00,680 --> 01:01:04,160
22% attributed to life cycle automation and reduced waste.

1294
01:01:04,160 --> 01:01:06,560
Again, no magic, just physics.

1295
01:01:06,560 --> 01:01:10,400
When tagging becomes enforceable, cost attribution stops being a political debate

1296
01:01:10,400 --> 01:01:11,320
and becomes a query.

1297
01:01:11,320 --> 01:01:14,040
When ownership becomes durable, resources stop living forever

1298
01:01:14,040 --> 01:01:16,600
because nobody wants to delete someone else's work.

1299
01:01:16,600 --> 01:01:18,760
When privileged access expires by default,

1300
01:01:18,760 --> 01:01:22,680
fewer people can create just in case infrastructure that nobody ever revisits.

1301
01:01:22,680 --> 01:01:24,840
When orphaned identities get quarantined,

1302
01:01:24,840 --> 01:01:27,440
zombie automation stops running unnoticed.

1303
01:01:27,440 --> 01:01:30,320
Finops always wants to believe the problem is price, it isn't.

1304
01:01:30,320 --> 01:01:32,120
The problem is unknown persistence.

1305
01:01:32,120 --> 01:01:35,560
A control plane reduces spend by attacking persistence at the source.

1306
01:01:35,560 --> 01:01:39,720
Who can create under what pattern and what happens when the creator disappears?

1307
01:01:39,720 --> 01:01:41,240
Third, audits got clean.

1308
01:01:41,240 --> 01:01:43,120
They passed with zero major findings,

1309
01:01:43,120 --> 01:01:44,720
not because the auditors were generous

1310
01:01:44,720 --> 01:01:48,200
and not because the security team finally found the perfect slide deck.

1311
01:01:48,200 --> 01:01:50,960
Because evidence became a byproduct of normal operations,

1312
01:01:50,960 --> 01:01:53,560
they could show the blueprint pattern for subscription creation.

1313
01:01:53,560 --> 01:01:56,800
They could show the identity standards for workload principles.

1314
01:01:56,800 --> 01:02:00,080
They could show access review results tied to ownership and usage.

1315
01:02:00,080 --> 01:02:03,120
They could show the exception pathway and its expiry behavior.

1316
01:02:03,120 --> 01:02:07,120
They could show policy assignments as defaults, not as best effort retrofits.

1317
01:02:07,120 --> 01:02:11,280
They could demonstrate that remediation wasn't dependent on someone noticing a spreadsheet row.

1318
01:02:11,280 --> 01:02:12,480
That distinction matters.

1319
01:02:12,480 --> 01:02:15,880
Auditors don't reward intention, they reward repeatability.

1320
01:02:15,880 --> 01:02:18,240
The bigger behavioral change was speed of response.

1321
01:02:18,240 --> 01:02:21,960
When incidents happened, responders didn't start by discovering what existed.

1322
01:02:21,960 --> 01:02:25,800
They started with inventory, which subscription, which workload identity,

1323
01:02:25,800 --> 01:02:29,800
which role assignments, which policies, which exceptions, which logging destinations.

1324
01:02:29,800 --> 01:02:33,640
The control plane shortened the time to truth because it made the estate queryable.

1325
01:02:33,640 --> 01:02:38,080
And then there's the uncomfortable part, the exceptions, they still had them, they always will.

1326
01:02:38,080 --> 01:02:41,840
But exceptions stopped metastasizing because exceptions had a life cycle,

1327
01:02:41,840 --> 01:02:45,320
an exception without an owner or an expiry wasn't flexibility.

1328
01:02:45,320 --> 01:02:48,480
It was a defect and defects got routed, not tolerated.

1329
01:02:48,480 --> 01:02:51,680
This is where the identity first model pays off long term.

1330
01:02:51,680 --> 01:02:54,040
When you govern the principles in the provisioning patterns,

1331
01:02:54,040 --> 01:02:57,200
you stop trying to govern every resource with human attention.

1332
01:02:57,200 --> 01:02:59,400
You govern the boundaries that create resources

1333
01:02:59,400 --> 01:03:02,520
and the system enforces consistency at the scale humans can't.

1334
01:03:02,520 --> 01:03:07,000
So yes, as your policy chaos became predictable, not perfect, predictable,

1335
01:03:07,000 --> 01:03:09,760
reduced drift, reduced spend, cleaner audits.

1336
01:03:09,760 --> 01:03:11,440
And that sets up the modern problem.

1337
01:03:11,440 --> 01:03:15,040
Copilot and shadow AI, because AI doesn't add a new app.

1338
01:03:15,040 --> 01:03:18,280
It adds a new class of principles, new processing surfaces,

1339
01:03:18,280 --> 01:03:23,760
and a probabilistic layer of behavior that will happily root around whatever you only enforced in meetings.

1340
01:03:23,760 --> 01:03:26,840
Next, the third case study where executives want to block AI

1341
01:03:26,840 --> 01:03:30,280
and the correct answer is to build an agent control plane instead.

1342
01:03:30,280 --> 01:03:35,320
Case study three, set up, copilot plus shadow AI, central agent governance.

1343
01:03:35,320 --> 01:03:38,520
The third case study begins with a familiar executive reflex.

1344
01:03:38,520 --> 01:03:39,680
We should slow down.

1345
01:03:39,680 --> 01:03:42,560
Copilot shows up, people get excited, a few early wins land,

1346
01:03:42,560 --> 01:03:46,480
then security asks the obvious questions, what data will it see, what will it summarize,

1347
01:03:46,480 --> 01:03:48,800
what will it send, what will it accidentally reveal,

1348
01:03:48,800 --> 01:03:52,840
and leadership briefly considers the simplest option, block it, delay it,

1349
01:03:52,840 --> 01:03:54,720
wait for the platform to mature.

1350
01:03:54,720 --> 01:03:56,080
That instinct feels responsible.

1351
01:03:56,080 --> 01:03:57,920
It's also how shadow AI is born.

1352
01:03:57,920 --> 01:04:01,640
Because the business problem doesn't pause just because governance is uncomfortable,

1353
01:04:01,640 --> 01:04:04,640
people still need drafts, summaries, answers, automation.

1354
01:04:04,640 --> 01:04:07,040
If sanctioned tooling feels slow or uncertain,

1355
01:04:07,040 --> 01:04:08,840
they root around it with personal accounts,

1356
01:04:08,840 --> 01:04:13,040
browser plugins, unofficial copilets and temporary connectors that never go away.

1357
01:04:13,040 --> 01:04:18,040
The tenant loses visibility and the organization loses the ability to claim control with a straight face.

1358
01:04:18,040 --> 01:04:21,200
So the starting state in this case wasn't a single copilot rollout.

1359
01:04:21,200 --> 01:04:24,920
It was a scattered pattern, teams experimenting with copilot in M365,

1360
01:04:24,920 --> 01:04:27,280
departments building copilets in copilot studio,

1361
01:04:27,280 --> 01:04:29,720
makers stitching together AI adjacent flows,

1362
01:04:29,720 --> 01:04:33,720
and employees quietly pasting content into external models because it was faster.

1363
01:04:33,720 --> 01:04:36,440
And the fear wasn't irrational, it was just poorly specified.

1364
01:04:36,440 --> 01:04:39,480
The core risk wasn't AI might leak data in the abstract,

1365
01:04:39,480 --> 01:04:41,960
the risk was that AI introduces more runtime decisions,

1366
01:04:41,960 --> 01:04:46,080
more execution surfaces and more non-human identities that can act at scale.

1367
01:04:46,080 --> 01:04:48,920
While enforcement remains uneven across experiences.

1368
01:04:48,920 --> 01:04:52,160
This is where the platform reality collides with the boardroom narrative.

1369
01:04:52,160 --> 01:04:55,480
Executives kept asking, does copilot respect permissions?

1370
01:04:55,480 --> 01:05:00,240
Yes, in the foundational sense, copilot inherits the Microsoft 365 permissions model.

1371
01:05:00,240 --> 01:05:02,920
It doesn't magically read what a user can't access,

1372
01:05:02,920 --> 01:05:04,560
but that's not the only question that matters.

1373
01:05:04,560 --> 01:05:05,800
The real question is,

1374
01:05:05,800 --> 01:05:08,400
can the tenant consistently enforce its intent?

1375
01:05:08,400 --> 01:05:11,000
Across every AI entry point, every prompt surface,

1376
01:05:11,000 --> 01:05:14,280
every connector, every agent, and every downstream tool call?

1377
01:05:14,280 --> 01:05:17,800
And in the AI era, that answer is not automatically yes,

1378
01:05:17,800 --> 01:05:19,880
even if your identity model is clean.

1379
01:05:19,880 --> 01:05:20,800
There are two reasons.

1380
01:05:20,800 --> 01:05:22,800
First, enforcement surfaces differ.

1381
01:05:22,800 --> 01:05:27,680
Sensitivity labels and DLP don't behave uniformly across every copilot scenario and every app.

1382
01:05:27,680 --> 01:05:31,200
Microsoft documentation already acknowledges that label-based exclusions

1383
01:05:31,200 --> 01:05:35,960
can apply in some office apps, but remain available in other scenarios like Teams or copilot chat.

1384
01:05:35,960 --> 01:05:40,320
The system is improving, but it is not a single, perfectly consistent policy boundary.

1385
01:05:40,320 --> 01:05:42,040
Second, defects happen at the seams.

1386
01:05:42,040 --> 01:05:43,520
This isn't theoretical.

1387
01:05:43,520 --> 01:05:48,800
In January, 2026, Microsoft acknowledged a bug service advisory CW1226324,

1388
01:05:48,800 --> 01:05:53,720
where copilot chat could incorrectly process confidential labeled emails in scent items and drafts,

1389
01:05:53,720 --> 01:05:57,160
despite configured DLP and sensitivity label controls.

1390
01:05:57,160 --> 01:06:03,360
Microsoft stated, "Axis controls remained intact and that no one gained access they weren't already authorized to see."

1391
01:06:03,360 --> 01:06:07,840
Fine, legally neat, operationally irrelevant.

1392
01:06:07,840 --> 01:06:12,840
The point is that the exclusion model failed its promise in a real production tenant experience,

1393
01:06:12,840 --> 01:06:17,040
so the organization in this case had the same problem every mature tenant eventually has.

1394
01:06:17,040 --> 01:06:18,360
Trust eroded.

1395
01:06:18,360 --> 01:06:20,720
Not because copilot was unsafe by design,

1396
01:06:20,720 --> 01:06:24,520
but because the organization had no way to prove continuously

1397
01:06:24,520 --> 01:06:29,000
that controls behaved the way they thought they behaved, they could say we have labels,

1398
01:06:29,000 --> 01:06:31,240
they could say we enabled DLP.

1399
01:06:31,240 --> 01:06:36,280
They could not say we can verify enforcement across experiences and detect drift or defects quickly.

1400
01:06:36,280 --> 01:06:39,240
Meanwhile, shadow AI kept expanding the principle count.

1401
01:06:39,240 --> 01:06:44,320
Copilot's plug-ins, connectors, automation accounts, service principles, agents that call tools,

1402
01:06:44,320 --> 01:06:47,840
each one is a pathway, each one is a blast radius decision.

1403
01:06:47,840 --> 01:06:51,520
And the organization had been governing, like it was still 2019,

1404
01:06:51,520 --> 01:06:55,000
review the app, approve the connector, hope the human remembered the policy.

1405
01:06:55,000 --> 01:06:58,200
That model collapses the moment AI makes creation cheap.

1406
01:06:58,200 --> 01:07:01,080
This is the part executives consistently miss.

1407
01:07:01,080 --> 01:07:05,120
AI doesn't just accelerate output, it accelerates entropy.

1408
01:07:05,120 --> 01:07:08,960
Because it lets more people build more automations with less friction and it turns,

1409
01:07:08,960 --> 01:07:14,320
I just need a quick summary into a data processing event that may cross boundaries you never tested.

1410
01:07:14,320 --> 01:07:17,760
The estate becomes more probabilistic, not because the AI is evil,

1411
01:07:17,760 --> 01:07:21,000
but because the number of states the system can enter explodes.

1412
01:07:21,000 --> 01:07:26,760
So leadership face the false choice, block AI and accept shadow AI or enable AI and accept chaos.

1413
01:07:26,760 --> 01:07:29,040
The control plane move was to reject the false choice.

1414
01:07:29,040 --> 01:07:32,400
They reframed copilot and agents as governable infrastructure,

1415
01:07:32,400 --> 01:07:35,600
not as productivity features, not as optional experiments,

1416
01:07:35,600 --> 01:07:40,800
as a new workload class that required the same treatment as any other production automation surface.

1417
01:07:40,800 --> 01:07:43,480
Identity, policy, life cycle, telemetry,

1418
01:07:43,480 --> 01:07:47,240
and they stopped calling it AI governance because that language invites policy theater,

1419
01:07:47,240 --> 01:07:50,960
they called it central agent governance, a control plane for agents.

1420
01:07:50,960 --> 01:07:54,360
The success condition wasn't no risk, that's fantasy.

1421
01:07:54,360 --> 01:07:57,760
The success condition was rapid rollout without losing control.

1422
01:07:57,760 --> 01:08:00,560
Clear ownership enforced boundaries, observable behavior,

1423
01:08:00,560 --> 01:08:05,760
a quarantine path when things go wrong, and an executive story grounded in operations, not hope.

1424
01:08:05,760 --> 01:08:07,360
That sets up the next section.

1425
01:08:07,360 --> 01:08:09,560
The control plane shift itself.

1426
01:08:09,560 --> 01:08:13,560
Prompt level DLP, agent identity, life cycle controls, and monitoring

1427
01:08:13,560 --> 01:08:15,960
that assumes defects are normal, not exceptional.

1428
01:08:15,960 --> 01:08:20,560
Case study three control plane shift, prompt DLP plus agent identity,

1429
01:08:20,560 --> 01:08:21,560
plus monitoring.

1430
01:08:21,560 --> 01:08:24,560
So they built the control plane the same way they rebuilt the others.

1431
01:08:24,560 --> 01:08:27,960
They stopped arguing about individual copilates and started engineering the system

1432
01:08:27,960 --> 01:08:29,560
that copilates must pass through.

1433
01:08:29,560 --> 01:08:34,760
The first layer was prompt level DLP because prompts are the new X filtration format,

1434
01:08:34,760 --> 01:08:36,760
not files, not emails, prompts.

1435
01:08:36,760 --> 01:08:38,960
They used Microsoft purview DLP policies,

1436
01:08:38,960 --> 01:08:44,160
scoped specifically to Microsoft 365 copilot and copilot chat with two enforcement paths,

1437
01:08:44,160 --> 01:08:46,760
rules based on sensitive information types,

1438
01:08:46,760 --> 01:08:48,960
and rules based on sensitivity labels.

1439
01:08:48,960 --> 01:08:51,960
And they treated those as separate controls because they are.

1440
01:08:51,960 --> 01:08:55,560
Side-based rules catch the obvious stuff, credit cards, national IDs,

1441
01:08:55,560 --> 01:08:58,160
the patents, compliance teams already understand.

1442
01:08:58,160 --> 01:09:01,760
Label-based rules catch the intentional classification of this document

1443
01:09:01,760 --> 01:09:03,760
is off limits for AI processing.

1444
01:09:03,760 --> 01:09:06,360
But they didn't sell this as we turned on DLP.

1445
01:09:06,360 --> 01:09:09,760
They sold it as AI processing is now a governed location,

1446
01:09:09,760 --> 01:09:12,760
and we can block it the same way we block an email leaving the tenant.

1447
01:09:12,760 --> 01:09:15,760
Then they did the part most organizations refuse to do.

1448
01:09:15,760 --> 01:09:17,760
They tested enforcement across experiences,

1449
01:09:17,760 --> 01:09:19,760
not because they don't trust Microsoft.

1450
01:09:19,760 --> 01:09:21,560
Because defects happen at the seams,

1451
01:09:21,560 --> 01:09:23,960
they validated what gets excluded in office apps,

1452
01:09:23,960 --> 01:09:27,960
what remains accessible in copilot chat and where labels behave inconsistently.

1453
01:09:27,960 --> 01:09:30,760
When they found gaps, they didn't pretend they didn't exist.

1454
01:09:30,760 --> 01:09:34,360
They documented compensating controls and built monitoring around the weak spots.

1455
01:09:34,360 --> 01:09:35,760
That's the control plane mindset,

1456
01:09:35,760 --> 01:09:39,760
treat product boundaries as probabilistic until proven deterministic.

1457
01:09:39,760 --> 01:09:41,960
The second layer was agent identity.

1458
01:09:41,960 --> 01:09:45,560
They stopped treating agents like features and started treating them like principles.

1459
01:09:45,560 --> 01:09:48,360
Every sanctioned copilot, every copilot studio agent,

1460
01:09:48,360 --> 01:09:51,960
every automation that could call tools got mapped to an identity object

1461
01:09:51,960 --> 01:09:54,760
with an owner, a purpose, and a life cycle boundary.

1462
01:09:54,760 --> 01:09:57,960
If the organization couldn't answer who owns this agent,

1463
01:09:57,960 --> 01:09:59,960
the agent didn't belong in production.

1464
01:09:59,960 --> 01:10:03,160
And they applied least privilege like it was going to be audited tomorrow

1465
01:10:03,160 --> 01:10:07,360
because it would be the key move here was separating can chat from can act.

1466
01:10:07,360 --> 01:10:11,360
Chatting overgrounded content is already risky when oversharing exists.

1467
01:10:11,360 --> 01:10:15,160
Tool invocation multiplies that risk because it turns text into execution.

1468
01:10:15,160 --> 01:10:19,960
So tool capable agents only received the minimal set of permissions required for their tool belt

1469
01:10:19,960 --> 01:10:22,960
and those permissions were bounded to specific resources,

1470
01:10:22,960 --> 01:10:24,560
wherever the platform allowed it.

1471
01:10:24,560 --> 01:10:27,560
No directory wide reads because it might need it later.

1472
01:10:27,560 --> 01:10:30,360
No global connector access because we're still experimenting.

1473
01:10:30,360 --> 01:10:32,560
They also put conditional access back in the story,

1474
01:10:32,560 --> 01:10:37,560
not as an afterthought, but as the way to constrain privileged and unmanaged pathways around agents.

1475
01:10:37,560 --> 01:10:41,760
Where admin sessions happen, what devices can manage agent configurations

1476
01:10:41,760 --> 01:10:46,560
and how risky sign-ins get challenged before they can modify the control plane itself.

1477
01:10:46,560 --> 01:10:51,760
Then they built life cycle controls for agents because agents sprawl is just apps sprawl with better branding.

1478
01:10:51,760 --> 01:10:59,560
Every agent had to exist in a registry name, owner, business purpose, data sources, tools, zones, and an expiry review date.

1479
01:10:59,560 --> 01:11:05,560
Not because governance loves forms, but because inventory is the difference between an asset and a rumor.

1480
01:11:05,560 --> 01:11:08,160
They implemented retirement and quarantine pathways,

1481
01:11:08,160 --> 01:11:12,560
an agent that stopped being used or started behaving strangely didn't trigger a meeting.

1482
01:11:12,560 --> 01:11:16,560
It triggered a state change, disabled tool calls, restrict scopes,

1483
01:11:16,560 --> 01:11:20,960
remove it from the approved catalog, force re-attestation.

1484
01:11:20,960 --> 01:11:24,560
Most orgs say will monitor it as a substitute for life cycle.

1485
01:11:24,560 --> 01:11:28,960
They made monitoring part of life cycle, which brings us to the third layer telemetry and detection.

1486
01:11:28,960 --> 01:11:32,560
They built monitoring around behavior, not around policy existence.

1487
01:11:32,560 --> 01:11:36,560
They watched for drift signals, new agents created outside the approved pathway,

1488
01:11:36,560 --> 01:11:43,360
connectors added to agents that changed their data reach prompt patterns that repeatedly hit DLP blocks and high-risk tool usage spikes.

1489
01:11:43,360 --> 01:11:47,760
And they treated that telemetry as governance input, not a security noise.

1490
01:11:47,760 --> 01:11:50,960
This is where they got honest about AI, assume defects happen,

1491
01:11:50,960 --> 01:11:54,560
assume enforcement is inconsistent, assume a future update changes behavior,

1492
01:11:54,560 --> 01:11:57,360
therefore build layered controls and a rapid containment mechanism.

1493
01:11:57,360 --> 01:12:01,560
So when the platform fails a label check in one surface, the organization still has,

1494
01:12:01,560 --> 01:12:06,360
identity boundaries, least privilege scopes, tool restrictions, DLP on prompts,

1495
01:12:06,360 --> 01:12:08,760
and monitoring that can detect abnormal patterns.

1496
01:12:08,760 --> 01:12:12,360
That's not paranoia, that's architecture.

1497
01:12:12,360 --> 01:12:14,360
And the final shift was cultural.

1498
01:12:14,360 --> 01:12:16,760
They stopped selling safe AI.

1499
01:12:16,760 --> 01:12:18,360
They sold governable AI.

1500
01:12:18,360 --> 01:12:19,960
Safe implies zero failure.

1501
01:12:19,960 --> 01:12:24,360
Governable implies observable failure with bounded blast radius and a fast response path.

1502
01:12:24,360 --> 01:12:28,760
Executives understand that because it maps to every other system they already trust.

1503
01:12:28,760 --> 01:12:32,760
Financial controls, change management, incident response.

1504
01:12:32,760 --> 01:12:35,160
This control plane didn't make co-pilot perfect.

1505
01:12:35,160 --> 01:12:39,560
It made co-pilot survivable at scale, and that's why the rollout didn't require heroics.

1506
01:12:39,560 --> 01:12:40,760
It required design.

1507
01:12:40,760 --> 01:12:44,360
Case study three, outcomes, rollout speed without losing control.

1508
01:12:44,360 --> 01:12:48,560
The outcomes in the co-pilot case weren't measured in how excited people sounded in a town hall.

1509
01:12:48,560 --> 01:12:52,160
They were measured in time, incidents, and adoption behavior.

1510
01:12:52,160 --> 01:12:54,360
Because that's where AI programs usually die.

1511
01:12:54,360 --> 01:12:56,360
First, rollout speed.

1512
01:12:56,360 --> 01:13:01,560
They went from, "We're not sure if we should enable this" to accompany wide rollout in 90 days.

1513
01:13:01,560 --> 01:13:03,560
Not a slow pilot that never graduates.

1514
01:13:03,560 --> 01:13:07,160
Not a limited preview that becomes permanent because nobody wants to own the decision.

1515
01:13:07,160 --> 01:13:11,160
90 days because the control plane made the risk legible and the path repeatable.

1516
01:13:11,160 --> 01:13:17,160
That's what executives actually buy, not AI, but the ability to say yes without gambling the tenant.

1517
01:13:17,160 --> 01:13:20,160
Second, sensitive data leakage events, they reported zero.

1518
01:13:20,160 --> 01:13:22,560
And it's important to say what that does and doesn't mean.

1519
01:13:22,560 --> 01:13:24,960
It doesn't mean co-pilot never touched sensitive data.

1520
01:13:24,960 --> 01:13:26,760
It doesn't mean every label was perfect.

1521
01:13:26,760 --> 01:13:28,560
It doesn't mean the platform never misbehaved.

1522
01:13:28,560 --> 01:13:29,760
We already know seems can fail.

1523
01:13:29,760 --> 01:13:34,360
What it means is that the system didn't produce a confirmed incident where restricted data

1524
01:13:34,360 --> 01:13:38,360
escaped its intended boundary through co-pilot-enabled pathways.

1525
01:13:38,360 --> 01:13:40,160
The layered controls did their job.

1526
01:13:40,160 --> 01:13:43,160
Prompt DLP blocked obvious exfiltration formats.

1527
01:13:43,160 --> 01:13:47,360
Label-based exclusions removed high-risk content from grounding, where supported,

1528
01:13:47,360 --> 01:13:51,560
least-privileged agent identities limited blast radius when something did slip through

1529
01:13:51,560 --> 01:13:54,760
and monitoring gave them a detection story that didn't depend on luck.

1530
01:13:54,760 --> 01:13:58,560
In other words, failure modes existed, but they were contained and observable.

1531
01:13:58,560 --> 01:13:59,560
Third adoption.

1532
01:13:59,560 --> 01:14:02,360
Adoption landed at about 2.3 times the forecast.

1533
01:14:02,360 --> 01:14:07,360
That sounds like a vanity metric until you translate it into what actually happened in the organization.

1534
01:14:07,360 --> 01:14:10,960
People used the sanction tool because it was easier than rooting around it.

1535
01:14:10,960 --> 01:14:13,360
This is the piece most governance teams refuse to internalize.

1536
01:14:13,360 --> 01:14:15,960
People don't bypass controls because they love risk.

1537
01:14:15,960 --> 01:14:20,560
They bypass controls because the control path is slower, unclear or humiliating.

1538
01:14:20,560 --> 01:14:23,760
The moment the control plane made co-pilot usage predictable,

1539
01:14:23,760 --> 01:14:27,760
clear boundaries, clear no, clear exception paths, users stopped treating it as a trap.

1540
01:14:27,760 --> 01:14:31,960
They treated it as infrastructure, and once that happens, adoption becomes an outcome of trust,

1541
01:14:31,960 --> 01:14:33,360
not a marketing campaign.

1542
01:14:33,360 --> 01:14:35,760
The more interesting outcome was operational posture.

1543
01:14:35,760 --> 01:14:40,160
Before the control plane, every executive question turned into an argument.

1544
01:14:40,160 --> 01:14:41,560
Is co-pilot safe?

1545
01:14:41,560 --> 01:14:43,760
Can we let people build their own agents?

1546
01:14:43,760 --> 01:14:46,560
What happens if someone pests customer data into a prompt?

1547
01:14:46,560 --> 01:14:51,760
Those questions don't have one-time answers, because the platform changes and human behavior changes.

1548
01:14:51,760 --> 01:14:55,760
After the control plane, the questions became operational, which agents exist?

1549
01:14:55,760 --> 01:14:57,160
Which ones can act?

1550
01:14:57,160 --> 01:14:58,960
Which data sources do they touch?

1551
01:14:58,960 --> 01:15:00,760
Which DLP rules are firing?

1552
01:15:00,760 --> 01:15:02,360
Which zones are being used?

1553
01:15:02,360 --> 01:15:04,760
What's the quarantine path if we see drift?

1554
01:15:04,760 --> 01:15:09,560
That shift matters because it turns AI governance from policy theatre into systems management.

1555
01:15:09,560 --> 01:15:10,760
It becomes boring.

1556
01:15:10,760 --> 01:15:12,760
Boring is good.

1557
01:15:12,760 --> 01:15:19,360
Now the constraint, the part that stops this from becoming a fairytale, is maturity, two maturities specifically.

1558
01:15:19,360 --> 01:15:21,360
Labeling maturity.

1559
01:15:21,360 --> 01:15:25,760
If sensitivity labels are inconsistent, then label-based DLP for co-pilot is inconsistent.

1560
01:15:25,760 --> 01:15:29,360
The control plane can't enforce a classification model you didn't implement,

1561
01:15:29,360 --> 01:15:33,160
so they had to treat labeling as foundational infrastructure, not as a compliance project.

1562
01:15:33,160 --> 01:15:36,960
They prioritized high-risk repositories first, automated where they could,

1563
01:15:36,960 --> 01:15:39,360
and accepted that coverage would ramp over time.

1564
01:15:39,360 --> 01:15:41,760
Identity hygiene, maturity.

1565
01:15:41,760 --> 01:15:45,760
If the tenant already tolerates over-privileged apps and often principles,

1566
01:15:45,760 --> 01:15:47,960
then adding agents is just adding gasoline.

1567
01:15:47,960 --> 01:15:52,760
Their success depended on treating agent identities like first-class principles with ownership,

1568
01:15:52,760 --> 01:15:54,360
review, and bounded permissions.

1569
01:15:54,360 --> 01:15:58,360
So yes, the outcomes were strong, fast rollout, no confirmed sensitive leakage events,

1570
01:15:58,360 --> 01:15:59,960
and adoption that beat forecasts.

1571
01:15:59,960 --> 01:16:01,360
But the real win was simpler.

1572
01:16:01,360 --> 01:16:03,360
They didn't make AI safe.

1573
01:16:03,360 --> 01:16:04,760
They made AI governable.

1574
01:16:04,760 --> 01:16:07,360
And that's the only goal that survives contact with reality,

1575
01:16:07,360 --> 01:16:11,360
because the next platform update, the next defect, and the next clever user will always show up.

1576
01:16:11,360 --> 01:16:14,560
The control plane is how you keep that from becoming panic.

1577
01:16:14,560 --> 01:16:15,760
Executive objection.

1578
01:16:15,760 --> 01:16:17,560
Governance slows innovation.

1579
01:16:17,560 --> 01:16:20,360
This is the line that shows up in every executive meeting,

1580
01:16:20,360 --> 01:16:23,960
usually right after someone describes a control that sounds like work.

1581
01:16:23,960 --> 01:16:26,960
Governance slows innovation.

1582
01:16:26,960 --> 01:16:31,360
It feels true because most organizations have only experienced governance as paperwork.

1583
01:16:31,360 --> 01:16:35,760
Intake forms, review boards, exception emails, and a two-week wait to be told,

1584
01:16:35,760 --> 01:16:37,560
"No, without an alternative."

1585
01:16:37,560 --> 01:16:40,360
That's not governance. That's a cue with a badge.

1586
01:16:40,360 --> 01:16:43,160
The uncomfortable truth is that governance doesn't slow innovation.

1587
01:16:43,160 --> 01:16:45,160
Human review slows innovation.

1588
01:16:45,160 --> 01:16:48,760
And when you confuse those two, you build the most expensive kind of theater.

1589
01:16:48,760 --> 01:16:51,560
You keep the meetings, you keep the delays, and you still fail audits,

1590
01:16:51,560 --> 01:16:53,360
because none of it is enforceable.

1591
01:16:53,360 --> 01:16:56,760
Here's what's actually happening in governance slows innovation organizations.

1592
01:16:56,760 --> 01:16:57,960
The business wants to ship.

1593
01:16:57,960 --> 01:17:00,560
It wants to reduce risk, security wants proof,

1594
01:17:00,560 --> 01:17:02,360
compliance wants consistency,

1595
01:17:02,360 --> 01:17:05,360
nobody owns the system behavior that connects those goals.

1596
01:17:05,360 --> 01:17:08,360
So they default to the only control they can operate without engineering,

1597
01:17:08,360 --> 01:17:09,360
manual approval.

1598
01:17:09,360 --> 01:17:11,160
Manual approval becomes the policy engine.

1599
01:17:11,160 --> 01:17:13,960
That means the slowest thing in the system defines the throughput

1600
01:17:13,960 --> 01:17:16,360
of the entire organization. It's not the platform,

1601
01:17:16,360 --> 01:17:18,760
it's not power platform or azure or copilot,

1602
01:17:18,760 --> 01:17:21,760
it's the fact that you decided humans would be the control plane.

1603
01:17:21,760 --> 01:17:24,760
And that's why executives think governance is the enemy.

1604
01:17:24,760 --> 01:17:27,560
They've only seen governance as humans blocking humans.

1605
01:17:27,560 --> 01:17:28,560
Now flip the model.

1606
01:17:28,560 --> 01:17:30,160
A control plane isn't a new committee.

1607
01:17:30,160 --> 01:17:33,760
It's a programmable decision layer that makes the safe path the easy path.

1608
01:17:33,760 --> 01:17:37,560
It takes intent who can create what, where,

1609
01:17:37,560 --> 01:17:41,360
with which data pathways, and turns it into enforced defaults.

1610
01:17:41,360 --> 01:17:42,360
That is not slower.

1611
01:17:42,360 --> 01:17:45,760
It's faster because it removes negotiation from the hot path.

1612
01:17:45,760 --> 01:17:50,560
The thing nobody says out loud is that app first scaling is what slows innovation over time.

1613
01:17:50,560 --> 01:17:53,560
It looks fast early because you can build anything anywhere.

1614
01:17:53,560 --> 01:17:56,760
Then the estate grows ownership decays exceptions, metastasize,

1615
01:17:56,760 --> 01:18:01,360
and suddenly every new app needs a review because nobody trusts the system anymore.

1616
01:18:01,360 --> 01:18:03,360
Innovation becomes gated by distrust.

1617
01:18:03,360 --> 01:18:04,760
That's the cost of entropy.

1618
01:18:04,760 --> 01:18:07,560
You pay it later as friction control planes do the opposite.

1619
01:18:07,560 --> 01:18:10,560
They accelerate innovation by making self-service safe.

1620
01:18:10,560 --> 01:18:11,960
Not safe because people are good.

1621
01:18:11,960 --> 01:18:15,960
Safe because the system doesn't allow unsafe defaults in the zones that matter.

1622
01:18:15,960 --> 01:18:19,760
This is the part executives actually care about speed with repeatability.

1623
01:18:19,760 --> 01:18:23,360
If a business unit can create an internal productivity app in 20 minutes

1624
01:18:23,360 --> 01:18:25,360
because the environment is pre-classified,

1625
01:18:25,360 --> 01:18:27,360
the connector set is already constrained,

1626
01:18:27,360 --> 01:18:29,160
the ownership model is enforced,

1627
01:18:29,160 --> 01:18:31,160
and the inventory is automatic.

1628
01:18:31,160 --> 01:18:34,160
That is faster than a six week approval cycle.

1629
01:18:34,160 --> 01:18:38,560
It's also more governable than the approval cycle because the approval cycle produces opinions.

1630
01:18:38,560 --> 01:18:41,960
The control plane produces evidence, and yes, there are still constraints.

1631
01:18:41,960 --> 01:18:42,960
That's the point.

1632
01:18:42,960 --> 01:18:44,760
The question isn't whether constraints exist.

1633
01:18:44,760 --> 01:18:47,960
The question is whether the constraints are enforced by design

1634
01:18:47,960 --> 01:18:52,760
or enforced by humans after the fact because enforcement after the fact is where innovation dies.

1635
01:18:52,760 --> 01:18:56,560
Rework, retrofits, and emergency exceptions that become permanent.

1636
01:18:56,560 --> 01:18:58,960
This is where the "but" therefore, logic matters.

1637
01:18:58,960 --> 01:19:01,760
Teams once speed, but manual governance creates cues.

1638
01:19:01,760 --> 01:19:03,560
Therefore, teams root around governance,

1639
01:19:03,560 --> 01:19:06,960
but rooting around governance creates shadow systems and audit gaps.

1640
01:19:06,960 --> 01:19:09,560
Therefore, leadership reacts by adding more approvals.

1641
01:19:09,560 --> 01:19:14,960
And now the organization has the worst of both worlds, slower delivery and less visibility.

1642
01:19:14,960 --> 01:19:16,960
Control plane design breaks that loop.

1643
01:19:16,960 --> 01:19:18,760
It creates two lanes on purpose.

1644
01:19:18,760 --> 01:19:20,560
A green lane for exploration,

1645
01:19:20,560 --> 01:19:22,960
where the blast radius is limited by design,

1646
01:19:22,960 --> 01:19:28,160
and a red lane for regulated work where unsafe pairings are impossible and evidence is automatic.

1647
01:19:28,160 --> 01:19:31,160
The lanes aren't moral judgments, they're architectural boundaries.

1648
01:19:31,160 --> 01:19:34,560
And when someone needs an exception, the exception is not an email thread.

1649
01:19:34,560 --> 01:19:37,760
It's an engineered workflow with an owner and an expiry.

1650
01:19:37,760 --> 01:19:40,760
Exceptions stop being political, they become governed objects.

1651
01:19:40,760 --> 01:19:44,960
So the rebuttal to governance slows innovation isn't a motivational speech about balance.

1652
01:19:44,960 --> 01:19:49,760
It's a system statement, apps slow innovation, control planes accelerated.

1653
01:19:49,760 --> 01:19:54,960
Because apps scale outputs, but they also scale ambiguity.

1654
01:19:54,960 --> 01:19:56,160
Who owns what?

1655
01:19:56,160 --> 01:19:59,560
Where the data goes, what changed, what's allowed, what's exempt.

1656
01:19:59,560 --> 01:20:07,160
Ambiguity creates tickets, tickets create cues, cues create shadow IT, shadow IT creates incidents, incidents create more governance theatre.

1657
01:20:07,160 --> 01:20:08,560
That's the cycle you're in.

1658
01:20:08,560 --> 01:20:11,160
The way out is to stop making humans the policy engine.

1659
01:20:11,160 --> 01:20:14,160
If you want a line that lands in an executive room, it's this.

1660
01:20:14,160 --> 01:20:18,160
If your governance depends on humans reviewing apps, you don't have governance.

1661
01:20:18,160 --> 01:20:19,160
You have bottlenecks.

1662
01:20:19,160 --> 01:20:23,160
A control plane makes governance disappear into the creation pathway.

1663
01:20:23,160 --> 01:20:27,560
And when governance becomes invisible, innovation stops fighting it, it uses it.

1664
01:20:27,560 --> 01:20:30,760
The new operating model, self-service with guardrails.

1665
01:20:30,760 --> 01:20:34,360
So if control planes replace human review, the next question is obvious.

1666
01:20:34,360 --> 01:20:36,560
What does the operating model look like when it's real?

1667
01:20:36,560 --> 01:20:40,960
Not a slide, not a policy wiki, not a centre of excellence that exists as a mailbox.

1668
01:20:40,960 --> 01:20:46,160
An operating model that actually moves work through the tenant without turning every decision into a ticket.

1669
01:20:46,160 --> 01:20:48,160
It starts with admitting a simple truth.

1670
01:20:48,160 --> 01:20:49,760
Self-service is going to happen.

1671
01:20:49,760 --> 01:20:53,560
The only choice is whether it happens inside your boundaries or outside them.

1672
01:20:53,560 --> 01:20:57,160
So the model becomes self-service with guardrails, not self-service with training,

1673
01:20:57,160 --> 01:20:59,760
not self-service with please follow the guidelines.

1674
01:20:59,760 --> 01:21:04,960
Guardrails enforce boundaries that shape behaviour even when nobody is paying attention.

1675
01:21:04,960 --> 01:21:06,560
The first mechanism is zoning.

1676
01:21:06,560 --> 01:21:08,360
Green zones exist for exploration.

1677
01:21:08,360 --> 01:21:12,360
Makers can build test connectors and prototype without waiting for a committee.

1678
01:21:12,360 --> 01:21:15,360
But the green zone has intentionally limited blast radius,

1679
01:21:15,360 --> 01:21:18,760
controlled sharing defaults, limited data access patterns,

1680
01:21:18,760 --> 01:21:23,160
and a clear rule that green artifacts are not production dependencies.

1681
01:21:23,160 --> 01:21:24,960
If they become valuable, they get promoted.

1682
01:21:24,960 --> 01:21:26,560
Promotion is not moral judgment.

1683
01:21:26,560 --> 01:21:30,160
Promotion is a controlled transition into a zone where the rules change.

1684
01:21:30,160 --> 01:21:33,160
Yellow zones exist for departmental solutions.

1685
01:21:33,160 --> 01:21:36,360
Real value, real users, but still bounded risk.

1686
01:21:36,360 --> 01:21:39,760
Connector sets narrow, sharing rules, tighten.

1687
01:21:39,760 --> 01:21:41,760
Ownership continuity becomes mandatory.

1688
01:21:41,760 --> 01:21:45,160
This is where most internal productivity automation should live.

1689
01:21:45,160 --> 01:21:47,560
Red zones exist for regulated workloads.

1690
01:21:47,560 --> 01:21:52,360
HR, finance, customer data, anything with real compliance exposure.

1691
01:21:52,360 --> 01:21:54,560
In red zones, the system stops pretending.

1692
01:21:54,560 --> 01:21:55,960
Connector allow lists.

1693
01:21:55,960 --> 01:22:00,760
Strong identity controls, managed solution discipline, logging and evidence as defaults.

1694
01:22:00,760 --> 01:22:02,960
You do not request permission to be safe.

1695
01:22:02,960 --> 01:22:08,360
Safety is built into the zone, and exceptions become explicit objects with owners and expiry.

1696
01:22:08,360 --> 01:22:11,560
This zoning model does something executives understand immediately.

1697
01:22:11,560 --> 01:22:13,260
It replaces debates with lanes.

1698
01:22:13,260 --> 01:22:15,360
Instead of asking, should we allow this?

1699
01:22:15,360 --> 01:22:18,160
The question becomes, which lane does it belong in?

1700
01:22:18,160 --> 01:22:21,560
And the answer determines what the platform will allow by default.

1701
01:22:21,560 --> 01:22:25,360
Now, the moment you introduce zones, you trigger the second question, who runs them?

1702
01:22:25,360 --> 01:22:27,760
This is where most orgs fall into the CE trap.

1703
01:22:27,760 --> 01:22:33,160
They build a hub, centralize every decision and recreate the same human bottleneck they claim they were eliminating.

1704
01:22:33,160 --> 01:22:35,360
So the operating model needs to be explicit.

1705
01:22:35,360 --> 01:22:37,760
Hub and spoke are federated, chosen on purpose.

1706
01:22:37,760 --> 01:22:40,960
A hub and spoke model works when you need consistency,

1707
01:22:40,960 --> 01:22:44,060
and you can't starve six independent governance teams.

1708
01:22:44,060 --> 01:22:48,160
The hub defines policy, patterns, templates and the control plane automation.

1709
01:22:48,160 --> 01:22:50,960
The spokes build solutions inside those constraints,

1710
01:22:50,960 --> 01:22:54,760
and escalate only when they need a new capability added to the catalog.

1711
01:22:54,760 --> 01:22:59,760
A federated model works when scale forces it, multiple business units run their own automation pods,

1712
01:22:59,760 --> 01:23:04,360
but they share a common control plane contract, same zoning definitions, same ownership requirements,

1713
01:23:04,360 --> 01:23:07,560
same inventory fields, same exception workflow, same telemetry,

1714
01:23:07,560 --> 01:23:10,560
autonomy in the data plane, consistency in the control plane.

1715
01:23:10,560 --> 01:23:14,560
And no, where somewhere in between is not a model, it's how drift becomes permanent.

1716
01:23:14,560 --> 01:23:17,160
The third mechanism is engineered exception pathways.

1717
01:23:17,160 --> 01:23:20,760
If exceptions live in email threads, your control plane isn't real.

1718
01:23:20,760 --> 01:23:23,060
Your control plane is social dynamics.

1719
01:23:23,060 --> 01:23:28,460
Exceptions have to be workflows, request, justification, scope, time bound approval,

1720
01:23:28,460 --> 01:23:30,460
auto review and auto expiry.

1721
01:23:30,460 --> 01:23:32,160
The goal isn't to eliminate exceptions.

1722
01:23:32,160 --> 01:23:34,660
The goal is to eliminate invisible exceptions.

1723
01:23:34,660 --> 01:23:38,060
Invisible exceptions are how conditional access becomes conditional chaos,

1724
01:23:38,060 --> 01:23:42,460
how DLP becomes inconsistent and how audits turn into scavenger hunts.

1725
01:23:42,460 --> 01:23:47,860
The fourth mechanism is standard artifacts templates that encode naming, tagging, ownership and logging,

1726
01:23:47,860 --> 01:23:52,660
solution packaging that enforces life cycle, connector catalogs that define approved pathways.

1727
01:23:52,660 --> 01:23:56,260
Runbooks that describe what happens when a maker leaves, when a flow breaks,

1728
01:23:56,260 --> 01:23:58,260
when an agent starts behaving strangely.

1729
01:23:58,260 --> 01:23:59,460
This isn't bureaucracy.

1730
01:23:59,460 --> 01:24:01,160
This is how you remove bureaucracy.

1731
01:24:01,160 --> 01:24:05,660
Because when patterns are standardized, every new project doesn't invent governance from scratch.

1732
01:24:05,660 --> 01:24:09,260
And then there's the incentive problem, which every control plane strategy ignores

1733
01:24:09,260 --> 01:24:10,460
until the tenant collapses.

1734
01:24:10,460 --> 01:24:15,760
If you reward AppCount, you will get AppCount, you will also get duplicates, abandoned utilities,

1735
01:24:15,760 --> 01:24:18,460
and a support backlog that grows faster than your admin team.

1736
01:24:18,460 --> 01:24:22,560
So the operating model has to reward the opposite, deprecation and reuse.

1737
01:24:22,560 --> 01:24:25,560
Deprecation means you get credit for ending things cleanly,

1738
01:24:25,560 --> 01:24:29,160
reuse means you get credit for building components others can adopt.

1739
01:24:29,160 --> 01:24:31,360
And those incentives can't just be cultural.

1740
01:24:31,360 --> 01:24:37,060
They need system support, inventory visibility, reuse catalogs and life cycle automation

1741
01:24:37,060 --> 01:24:39,560
that makes clean retirement the default behavior.

1742
01:24:39,560 --> 01:24:44,060
Finally, the model needs one executive facing truth serum, a single metric that measures

1743
01:24:44,060 --> 01:24:46,560
whether guardrails are working or just being performed.

1744
01:24:46,560 --> 01:24:50,960
That metric is support tickets because ticket volume is where ambiguity cash is out.

1745
01:24:50,960 --> 01:24:55,260
It's where missing ownership becomes cost, where policy inconsistency becomes friction,

1746
01:24:55,260 --> 01:24:58,060
where exceptions become delays, where drift becomes outages.

1747
01:24:58,060 --> 01:25:01,060
A control plane operating model isn't more governance.

1748
01:25:01,060 --> 01:25:02,260
It's less drama.

1749
01:25:02,260 --> 01:25:05,660
And it's achieved the only way drama ever dies in Microsoft estates

1750
01:25:05,660 --> 01:25:09,060
by making the system enforce intended scales so humans don't have to.

1751
01:25:09,060 --> 01:25:13,060
The metric 40% reduction in governance related support tickets.

1752
01:25:13,060 --> 01:25:17,060
So if an executive asks, how do we know this control plane thing is real?

1753
01:25:17,060 --> 01:25:19,660
The answer can't be because the admin center looks cleaner.

1754
01:25:19,660 --> 01:25:22,260
It has to be a metric that punishes theater.

1755
01:25:22,260 --> 01:25:24,460
Governance related support tickets do that.

1756
01:25:24,460 --> 01:25:25,860
Define the category brutally.

1757
01:25:25,860 --> 01:25:30,660
Tickets about ownership transfers, broken connections, access requests, connector approvals,

1758
01:25:30,660 --> 01:25:33,860
DLP confusion, environment drift, who can see this?

1759
01:25:33,860 --> 01:25:34,860
Why did this stop?

1760
01:25:34,860 --> 01:25:37,260
And the classic nobody knows what this flow does.

1761
01:25:37,260 --> 01:25:38,560
And those aren't IT problems.

1762
01:25:38,560 --> 01:25:41,560
Their control plane failure is being paid for with human time.

1763
01:25:41,560 --> 01:25:44,760
Ticket volume is the truth serum because it measures friction and ambiguity

1764
01:25:44,760 --> 01:25:46,060
at the point it becomes labor.

1765
01:25:46,060 --> 01:25:49,760
And labor is what executives actually fund, whether they admit it or not.

1766
01:25:49,760 --> 01:25:51,060
Now the number isn't mystical.

1767
01:25:51,060 --> 01:26:00,260
40% reduction comes from mechanics fewer unknown owners fewer manual approval loops fewer inconsistent DLP outcomes between zones fewer emergency fixes

1768
01:26:00,260 --> 01:26:02,760
when a lever takes the only added rights with them.

1769
01:26:02,760 --> 01:26:07,060
The key is you don't chase the number you instrument it.

1770
01:26:07,060 --> 01:26:14,260
Baseline first tag tickets for 30 to 60 days with a simple taxonomy ownership, access connectors,

1771
01:26:14,260 --> 01:26:22,560
DLP environment identity, life cycle, then roll out the control plane gates, enforced creation pathways, continuity ownership,

1772
01:26:22,560 --> 01:26:28,460
zoned policies, automated retirement signals, inventory that answers questions without meetings.

1773
01:26:28,460 --> 01:26:32,260
Then you measure deltas don't not overall ticket volume because that's noisy.

1774
01:26:32,260 --> 01:26:37,160
Governance related volume time to resolution, re-open rate and escalation rate to admins

1775
01:26:37,160 --> 01:26:39,760
because admins being the hot path is the failure mode.

1776
01:26:39,760 --> 01:26:49,160
When those curves bend it's not a productivity story it's proof that ambiguity stopped reproducing failure modes how control planes rot into theater 700 words.

1777
01:26:49,160 --> 01:26:58,960
Control planes aren't immune to entropy they just move the fight upstream and if you build one badly you don't get safety you get a more expensive version of the same chaos now with a nicer vocabulary.

1778
01:26:58,960 --> 01:27:05,860
Here are the failure modes that rot a control plane into theater first over privileged automation.

1779
01:27:05,860 --> 01:27:15,260
The moment someone says we'll just use app only permissions so we can run this headless the control plane is one bad consent grant away from becoming an attacker's dream.

1780
01:27:15,260 --> 01:27:29,860
Graph makes it easy to automate at scale that's the value that's also the blast radius if the control planes provisioning engine has permissions that allow it to enumerate the directory modify owners create service principles and grant access broadly you've built a universal skeleton key.

1781
01:27:29,860 --> 01:27:45,860
And then you'll tell auditors don't worry only the automation uses it that sentence has never protected anyone a control plane is supposed to enforce least privilege if the control plane itself violates least privilege you didn't engineer governance you engineer the privilege back door with a runbook second policies.

1782
01:27:45,860 --> 01:27:59,660
Prol conditional access is the classic example because it looks like a policy engine and behaves like an additive rule set with no sense of your intent the policies pile up exclusions pile up legacy exceptions never expire and you eventually reach a state where nobody can

1783
01:27:59,660 --> 01:28:15,660
explain why an access outcome happened that is conditional chaos and it's not limited to enter it happens in DLP it happens in environment strategies it happens in connector governance every time you keep adding rules without pruning testing and versioning you convert a deterministic model into a probabilistic one.

1784
01:28:15,660 --> 01:28:25,660
The control plane can't be set and forget it has to be treated like code testable reviewable and actively refacted otherwise it becomes a museum of yesterday's incidents.

1785
01:28:25,660 --> 01:28:53,660
Third label fantasy DLP for copilot and agents is real but it's only as strong as your labeling coverage and your enforcement consistency across experiences if your sensitivity labels are an aspirational project DLP becomes a false sense of control if you assume a label blocks everywhere and it actually blocks in some office apps but not in other copilot scenarios you have a gap and the gap will get found not by an attacker first by an employee who just wants an answer and doesn't understand why the protected documents still shows up in a chat scenario.

1786
01:28:53,660 --> 01:29:06,660
Then it becomes a compliance escalation then the reaction is panic then leadership says a eyes unsafe then shadow AI grows a mature control plane doesn't pretend label coverage is complete it treats coverage gaps as explicit risk and builds compensating controls.

1787
01:29:06,660 --> 01:29:22,660
Least privilege tool restrictions zoning monitoring and containment fourth often everything control plane thinking usually starts with apps and flows then it graduates to identities and subscriptions and then AI shows up and you get a new scaling problem the number of principles explodes.

1788
01:29:22,660 --> 01:29:41,660
Agents copilot service principles manage identities connectors automation accounts runtime tools if you don't engineer life cycle ownership continuity retirement quarantine your control plane turns into a registry of ghosts and ghosts don't just waste money they retain permissions retain data parts and retain the ability to surprise you in an incident.

1789
01:29:41,660 --> 01:30:10,660
Often is not a cleanup task it's a design failure every identity and automation object should have a life cycle that ends by default if it can persist without an owner and without activity you didn't build a control plane you built an artifact store fifth no telemetry this is the most common and the most embarrassing organizations build controls and then never prove they work they don't measure drift they don't measure bypass attempts they don't measure how often DLP blocks happen they don't measure whether exceptions expire they don't measure whether inventory is accurate they just assume.

1790
01:30:10,660 --> 01:30:39,660
And in Microsoft ecosystems assumption is where incidents come from if you can't observe drift you can't claim control if you can't show evidence without heroics your control plane is a slide deck telemetry is not nice to have telemetry is the control planes nervous system without it you're just enforcing rules blindly and calling it governance and the final failure mode the one that kills the whole model is when the organization rebuilds human review inside the control plane they build a portal then they add approval steps then they add exceptions then they add a temporary.

1791
01:30:39,660 --> 01:30:59,660
Manual override and suddenly admins are the hot path again tickets come back cues come back shadow systems come back control plane can include humans for high risk decisions it should but humans can't be the default decision engine if your control plane requires a person to bless every creation you didn't remove the bottleneck you just rebranded it the system law stays the same.

1792
01:30:59,660 --> 01:31:28,660
At enterprise scale the bottleneck is always the part that requires attention so if you want this to work the control plane has to do what humans can't enforce intent consistently continuously and without negotiation that means these privilege baked into automation policies treated like code labels treated like coverage not magic life cycle treated as default telemetry treated as mandatory and human review reserved for the few decisions that actually deserve it otherwise you'll end up right where you started more apps more

1793
01:31:28,660 --> 01:31:42,660
tickets more governance less control stop scaling apps scale a programmable control plane that makes governance invisible and innovation safe by default if this episode helps you cut governance related ticket volume and audit friction

1794
01:31:42,660 --> 01:31:55,660
and connect with me or repeaters on LinkedIn I post control plane patterns and the ugly lessons that create them next topic what part of your tenant feels like conditional chaos right now