What is Cloud flows

As stated, cloud flows are the most common Power Automate flows. Cloud flows use connectors to interact with different services. Currently there are over 1,000 prebuilt connectors available. These connectors allow you to interact with data from other Microsoft products and data from non-Microsoft vendors such as Google, Salesforce, Oracle, and more.

There are three main types of cloud flows that you can create:

• Automated flows: These flows are automatically triggered by an event. This might be the arrival of an email from a specific person, or a mention of your company in social media. These are the most used cloud flow.
• Instant flows: These flows are started automatically and are done with the click of a button. You can automate for repetitive tasks from your Desktop or Mobile devices. For example, you might use an instant flow to instantly send a reminder to the team with the push of a button from your mobile device.
• Scheduled: These flows run on a defined schedule. They might be used to fire off daily data uploads to Microsoft SharePoint or a database.

Now that we explored the types of cloud flows you can create, let’s explore some common scenarios where organizations might use cloud flows.

• Approvals: They can be used to automate approval processes such as invoice approval, time off requests, project approval, and more.
• Application integration: They can be used to allow an application to interact with another application. For example, a technician in the field might use a dedicated app to request a part. A Power Automate flow could automatically order the part in the company’s inventory system.
• Improve productivity: End users might create personal Power Automate flows to automatically do things such as saving attachments received via email to specific locations like SharePoint or OneDrive.

More advanced examples of organizations utilizing Power Automate flows might include:

• Interfacing with a custom Application Programming Interface (API) built by a financial services company to automatically retrieve the most recent loan rates, and then calculate the rate of an individual based on their credit score.
• Create a smart data filing system whereas documents are received, and the content in them are scanned. Based on the type of document it is automatically filed in a specific location and could even be flagged as needed.

Since there are hundreds of templates available to support different scenarios, cloud flows are easily created by anyone.