Restrictive User Visibility - Power BI Connected via Business Central

[MLay22]

Hi All,

I have the case where the company has Business Central as their ERP system.

Currently, every user that connects to the Business Central tenant via Power BI is able to see, extract and transfrom ALL the tables + Columns in Business Central.

We require the need to have secuirty measures in place whereby certain users that will be creating reports in Power BI will have seperate restrictions on the data they can extract, based on their role. As it stands now, everyone in the organisation that has a Power BI Pro licence is able to see any data currently exisiting in Business central.

I am struggling to find a clear document outlining the options here.

1) Is there a way to restrict the sensitive tables + columns per user? Is this done in Power BI or in Business Central?

2) If the above is not possible, what are the alternatives to allow certain users in the company the ability to create reports from Business central without the possiblity of leaking senstivie information to users that will not be required to create reports but, will have Power BI licences and Restricted access to Business Central?

Please let me know if anything is unclear, and thank you in advance for any expereinces or help on the matter.

Kind Regards,

Max

[lbendlin]

Power BI has a concept of Row Level Security (and soon also Object Level Security).  That allows you to securely restrict access.  It is largely based on USERPRINCIPALNAME(), ie the report user's email address.  I would assume that your Business Central data security setup is based on the same, so ideally you could talk to the developers there to see if you can consume their security mapping tables. Then you can apply these to your Power BI data model, and make sure that each Power BI user will see the same level of data as they see in the EPR system.