Question about the data security/confidential data / licensing

[Greg1997]

Hello !

So for the past few weeks I've been experimenting with Power BI - watching tutorials, learning new concepts, trying to learn DAX and building reports to get used to it. At the moment, I am not using a Pro or Premium license ( althougth buying them wouldn't be a problem ) because this report I have to make for my company is a one-time-thing. So I just downloaded the software and started to experiment and build without an account or anything.

My question is whether using Power BI like this is safe, especially since some of the data that I will be using in my report is confidential, and I don't want that data to end up in a cloud or somehow get published. I've been reading a ton about this, but I don't quite understand whether the data is stored locally ( on my computer ) in its entirety or it leaves the device. I didn't buy a licence because I don't want/need to share it with anyone online ( which are basically the features of Pro, and I don't need the AI tools either - features of Premium ) and I only need to export that dashboard as a PDF.

Also, is it true ( I read this in another topic ) that the reports you make in Power BI Desktop with a free license get published by Microsoft? Because if that were the case, I would buy whatever license is needed to prevent that from happening. 

[christinepayton · Accepted solution]

Using it in the desktop version without a license is as safe as your computer is safe. The data lives on your computer until you publish it, and even when you publish it (which you have to explicitly select the "publish" button and select a workspace to do) it is private until you share or do a secondary "publish to web". The publish to the web is probably the thing you saw that was concerning - it's likely impossible to do this on accident, you have to have published it up to the cloud first and it's buried a couple levels down in the menu. 

[parry2k]

@Greg1997 great questions, let's start with this. When data leaves your premise:

When you publish your report to Power BI service and you are using import mode (most common) then it is in the cloud. Now the question comes, what cloud? Power BI service is maintained by Microsoft in their data centers and you can check in the Power BI service ( app.powerbi.com) in which tenant your data will reside.

Now 2nd question, who can access this data once it is published to the cloud? There is whole security built around who can see your data (report) in your tenant. You can explicitly share it with the users in the organization if you want, you can also share it with external users, but it will be only available to them if you share it.

And another question, what if I want to share the reports with others in my org but don't want to publish them to the service? There are two options: 1) you can share pbix files with your users internally (like sharing Excel files) they will open on the Power BI desktop and view the reports and do whatever they want but this is not a scalable solution because you can have many version of the same report as it can happen with Excel file as well. 2) There is a product called Power BI Report Server - it is similar to Power BI service but it is the on-prem solution. In this case, your data never leaves the premise, you can publish your reports to an internal Power BI server and give access to the users. 

I hope this gives you some idea but feel free to reach out if you need further clarification.