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Running PowerApps under personal account or service account?

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Posted on by KLD

Our security officer want to forbidden service accounts in our organisation. I am just wondering how people using Power Apps. Are you using your personal account or a service account? What are the cons of running under a personal account?

I am talking about business critical Power Apps for a department or project team.

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Building Power Apps

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BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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For good security (and to comply with Microsoft licencing agreements) you are supposed to have one account per person. If your tenant turns on two-factor authentication and people are using shared accounts, you would quickly learn how widely some passwords have been shared. Shared passwords are an open invitation to security problems. The only major con to individual accounts is the cost of licencing. If it's "business critical" shouldn't it be well-protected?

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KLD 39 on at

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Maybe I was not clear. I am talking about the owner of the Power App and the useraccount where the connections are running under.

I see multiple cons when the owner of a Power App is a personal account:

Our IT Provider is building the businiss critical Power Apps and not someone from the business
When the owner is a personal account, I expect the Power App will break when this user is leaving our organisation
When the owner is a personal account, I expect the Power App will break when this user is changig password

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BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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My apologies, I misunderstood and wasted your time.

Consider a few things to help with your concerns:
Add an internal admin as Owner for all apps. You can have more than one Owner.
Give the external service provider an internal account to use too. There are some things they can't do from external accounts.
Changing a user password does not break the app
As an external user, the person is added to your org's Azure Active Directory. However, they are identified as an external user and have limited privileges.

When I do this for my customers, I frequently use both an internal and an external account.

Hope this helps!

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KLD 39 on at

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I am global admin. I know it is possible to add my global admin account to all PowerApps builded by our IT provider. But there will come some time I will leave this organisation. My global admin account will be deleted because it personal for me.

If I create a new account for the IT provider I have the same problem. That guy from the IT provider can leave hes organisation and there will come a new guy.

It looks like that a service account is the best solution, but we dont like service accounts from security risks.

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BCLS776 8,994 Moderator on at

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I see why accounts held by outside service providers carry additional risk. Perhaps this is an opportunity to make sure your company's IT governance framework addresses these kinds of items? For example, you can disable the service provider's account as soon as they are done their work for you.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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@BCLS776 I don't see this question as asking about outside service providers. Seems like "service account" here is used to indicate an account that is not tied to an individual. The idea is that, for mission critical processes, the complication of moving flows and apps from user to user whenever a user leaves the company is too easy to mess up, leaving service gaps if any app or flow is forgotten. Not only is it too easy to mess up, it's too time consuming. Having all mission critical apps and flows running under one account that can run in perpetuity, regardless of employees coming and going, is the best way to build for continuity of service. The issue lies in the glaring security hole this opens up.

@KLD , I'm with you on this. The Power Platform Center for Excellence (CoE) is an attempt from Microsoft to mitigate this issue. Users who are not global admins can be given specific admin rights for specific environments that allow them to move apps and flows from user to user. Basically crowd-sourcing the added work of moving apps between accounts to ensure that critical processes keep running. I'm not 100% certain on this last bit, perhaps @BCLS776 can let us know. I think that using the CoE would allow you to move apps and flows under a service account without actually needing the password to that service account. Your Admin could create the service account and give the password to nobody. You or the admin could then move apps and flows to run under that account without actually logging in under that account's credentials.

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