Restrict creation of new Power Platform environments to admins only

Note: This post applies to traditional environments, not Dataverse for Teams environments. Thanks to Loryan Strant for adding that clarification.

As long as someone in your organization is on a Power Apps or Power Automate per-user plan, they may have permission to create their own environment (unless you’ve already limited it previously in your organization). These environments can be used and shared by Dynamics 365, Power Apps portals and apps, and Power Automate flows. Environments can house multiple Dataverse tables (which can also be provisioned by a power user with appropriate licensing). Power Platform apps and Dynamics 365 can then connect to, read from, and write to these tables which would likely be shared across multiple applications/processes.

For example, if Megan Bowen is licensed on a Power Apps per-user plan she would, by default, be able to create new environments as she wished. And with the right training and deployed best practices, this may not be an issue. But if training isn’t provided and users are creating environments left and right, it may be time to limit who can create them (regardless of their licensing) until proper training and governance can be deployed.

So if you wish to manage environments centrally and prevent environment sprawl, you will want to limit the ability of users in your organization so they can’t create their own environments. Doing this may slow their individual productivity, but could also prevent duplicated efforts, inconsistent data organizationally, scattered naming conventions, and more. As long as you replace this restriction with a formal and effective governance policy, request form, etc. it will minimize disruption to your colleagues’ productivity.

Ready to do this? Let’s go over the steps to limit Microsoft Power Platform environment creation and management.

Limit new environment creation via the Power Platform admin center

As a Power Platform admin, sign in to the Power Platform admin center.

Choose the Settings gear in the upper right corner and choose Power Platform settings.

Then change Who can create production and sandbox environments to Only specific admins. As seen in the tooltip in the following screenshot, this limits creation to:

• Global admins
• Dynamics 365 service admins
• Power Platform service admins and
• Delegated admins

Click Save and you’re finished!

Note that this doesn’t remove existing environments or limit the abilities of their creator(s) to continue managing pre-existing environments. This setting will only apply to new environments and prevent additional unwanted sprawl.

Prefer to restrict environment creation and management via PowerShell? Check out this documentation.