How estates get here
A useful app gets built in the default environment by someone in finance. It works, so three more follow. None of them have ALM, none are in source control, and the default environment now runs something the month-end depends on.
Nobody made a bad decision. The platform is designed to let this happen, and the governance that would prevent it is a separate piece of work nobody was asked to do.
Separate the Tier-1 apps
The first stabilisation move is to identify what is business-critical and migrate it into dedicated environments. That gives you a boundary you can apply DLP, backup and release control to without disrupting the citizen development that makes the platform valuable.
On a recent rescue this covered a 37-application estate that had already suffered a major outage. Separation came before anything else.
Monitoring that people read
Integrated monitoring across Azure Monitor, Application Insights and Sentinel gives consolidated visibility. Raw alerting is worse than nothing, because teams stop reading it. On that engagement, custom KQL dashboards cut alert noise by 99% while surfacing real business impact.
Measure how many alerts somebody acted on.
Governance where Microsoft now puts it
Managed Environments, solution pipelines, DLP and environment routing, administered from the Power Platform admin centre. The community CoE Starter Kit was a reasonable stopgap for years, but it is a solution somebody has to own upgrading, and most estates we inherit are running a version two years behind.
Pair it with a transformation roadmap the client owns, so governance survives the consultants leaving.