Microsoft modernizes its datacenter leasing cycle with Power Platform

Empowering others to do more

To help Microsoft employees deliver great value to customers, Microsoft continuously invests in improving its own internal processes and strengthening its infrastructure. Millions of customers around the world rely on Microsoft Cloud, which is powered by more than 200 datacenters in 60+ regions. Microsoft owns a lot of its datacenters, but like many of the world's largest tech companies, it leases them as well. 

Datacenters are built to uphold uninterrupted power, cooling, networking, capacity, and compliance standards and requirements to deliver services every single day. Putting datacenters in the right locations matters, since they are geographically distributed to bring services closer to customers, reduce network latency, and allow for geo-redundant backup and failover.

Handling datacenter lease agreements and maintaining compliance and oversight of the Microsoft Cloud lease datacenter infrastructure falls within the purview of the CO+I Lease and Land Development (COILLD) business organization. As the foundation of the Microsoft Cloud leased datacenter business, the team handles planning, site acquisition, and deliveries that power Azure, Microsoft 365, Exchange, and other Microsoft business lines. As part of COILLD, the Lease Site Acquisition business team is responsible for the datacenter acquisition lifecycle from determining a location to signing a new lease to developing a potential exit migration strategy, which includes detailing how to migrate or retire a datacenter while not disrupting service for clients. The Lease team is also responsible for communication with Lessors, the external stakeholders Microsoft leases its datacenters from. 

Maintaining data integrity 

The lease due diligence process for a datacenter is complex, requiring clear plans and operational oversight for data residency, data sovereignty and compliance, and business continuity and data resiliency. The team had been using a legacy system to track datacenter technical compliance requirements. Employees relied on manual processes and tools like phone calls, emails, Microsoft 365 documents, and SharePoint to produce stakeholder reports and create, negotiate, and execute datacenter Statement Of Qualifications (SOQs), outlining things like technical compliance, agreements, and follow-up reporting requirements. The manual process was slow and tedious, which could negatively affect the overall site acquisition cycle. “With the rapidly changing world and constant innovation, we needed a solution that could adapt while ensuring accuracy. Inaccurate data impacts business decisions, and data errors could lead to serious financial and legal consequences,” says Vinod Rajpal, Digital Transformation and BI Lead at Microsoft.

Low code, high compliance 

Looking to replace its legacy system with a faster, more development-friendly solution, the COILLD team turned to the CO+I Acquire Engineering team within Microsoft to build an efficient, low-code solution. The two groups worked together to create the Lease Management Platform using Power Platform, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. The platform provides centralized lease data management, template drafting, and task management, and is managed in multiple environments for development, user testing, and production with the Azure DevOps pipeline for an agile deployment experience. "With Dynamics 365, Power Platform and the allied technologies we can build features out-of-the-box with minimal customizations, leading to fast paced solution development, increased return on investment and higher business value,” says Sameer Tarey, Partner Engineering Manager at Microsoft.

Now, the Lease team at Microsoft can enter and utilize data via model-driven apps and canvas apps (custom apps). A model-driven app design approach helps users create apps with preconfigured features, while a canvas-app approach creates custom apps from a blank canvas. External users, like Lessors and their team members, receive their unique portal access from Power Apps to execute on their lease specific negotiations and site due diligence technical procedures. These interactions trigger Power Automate, Azure Functions and WebApps, and Dynamics 365 workflows to automate routine, repeatable notification tasks that help users manage projects. “Power Automate has become our go-to option when we need to perform bulk data operations with relatively simple logic, streamline business processes via backend automation and drive efficiency gains through accelerated application development using prebuilt controls,” says Pradhumna Bhosale, Senior Engineering Lead at Microsoft. 

Datastores for the platform are spread out among Dataverse (integrated with PowerApps) for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and its custom entities (tables), Azure Blob Storage for datacenter schematics (a complete description of the datacenter building site) and lease agreement templates, and Azure SQL Database for the lease reporting data mart. Each datastore is selected to process the unique needs of the data it stores with security and scalability in mind.

The platform has improved communication between the Microsoft Lease business team and Lessors, helped increase stakeholder visibility, transparency, and better accountability and reporting of datacenter leasing operations. With the Lease Provider Portal, the team can send detailed specifications of service requirements to potential suppliers— the vendors who would lease datacenter premises to Microsoft and are responsible for the upkeep of the leased premises. System users from different disciplines can work in parallel, perform due diligence, and communicate with the supplier to negotiate. The system even summarizes the duration of projects, breaking it down by phases.

The team uses Dynamics 365 modules to build the application’s user experience and a large portion of its business logic.  Azure Active Directory paired with Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) is used to provide and manage user access for internal and external stakeholders. One engineering module the team is especially excited about is a custom Canvas app that creates Statement of Qualification (SOQ) templates. Now, users can update templates with datacenter technical requirements including categorical SOQ response types, and documents required for each specific leasing agreement, then share the SOQ with Lessors via the portal.

Better visibility, better accountability 

Currently, the platform is processing leases at three times more capacity than in the previous year with the legacy system and old processes. “With increasing competition and demand for Microsoft Cloud capacity, the Power Platform-based system enables the team to quickly assess optionality to deliver faster and more efficiently with automation focused on customer centricity, resiliency, efficiency, and performance at scale,” says Thiru Appadurai, Site Acquisition Business Lead at Microsoft. The secure and compliant system delivers a faster performance, reduces manual work, and limits duplicated actions and files. The Lease team has gained features that weren’t available previously, like service-level agreements and categories that highlight top priority work items, custom reports and dashboards, the ability to track important discussions, and self-serve capabilities so Lessors can manage their own teams. 

Given the success of the platform, developers feel empowered to create business applications with Power Platform. “We were able to build and deliver the product within a year, and that showed us how efficiently we can build products with Power Platform,” says Luis Suarez, Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft. “Power Platform includes a secure, low-code web frontend with Power Pages—formerly, Portals—which provides us rich and simplified site-authoring model alongside advanced development capabilities to create a responsive and modern rendering experience for our external provider-facing business portal.”  

“I love the portal. It loads faster and is designed very well. It substantially enhances SME work efficiency. I really appreciate the effort and commitment of Microsoft to bring this wonderful tool to us,” says Sabrina Shi, Sr. Electrical Engineer at Microsoft. “Power Pages seamlessly connects with the business data stored in Dataverse and allows us to build intelligent workflows and reports by integrating with Power Platform’s allied product lines.” The CO+I Lease Management Platform has improved data accuracy, visibility, and accountability across the business portfolio and helped significantly reduce the lease due diligence cycle time.

Easing into AI

The COILLD team is currently focused on making the solution interoperable with other systems for invoice tracking, payment scheduling, and other financial processes. "We are looking forward to using Power Pages and Azure Open AI service for data extractions, text summarizations, deviation detection, and more,” says Vinod Sharma, Senior Technical Program Manager at Microsoft. "The great results we’re seeing with the new platform are helping us efficiently power the Microsoft Cloud at scale. Our internal teams and the companies we work with around the world can feel confident about the infrastructure and its ability to support their daily business.”