What secure protocol does Power BI use for Azure SQL Server?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Our security group had a question about what secure protocol does Power BI Desktop use when you go from on premise to a Azure SQL Server using the Azure SQL Server connector?

Thanks!

[d_gosbell]

By default it will use TLS 1.2 - see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-security-overview#information-prote...

[C_H]

According to the documentation "Sql Server enforces encryption (TLS) at all times for all connections. This ensures all data is encrypted "in transit" between the client and server irrespective of the setting of Encrypt or TrustServerCertificate in the connection string."

Does that mean, all the traffic is encrypted even if I disable "Enrypt connection" in the Data source settings in PBI Desktop?

Thx in advance

[d_gosbell]

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@C_H wrote:

Does that mean, all the traffic is encrypted even if I disable "Enrypt connection" in the Data source settings in PBI Desktop?

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For Azure SQL - yes. For on-prem SQL it depends.

There is a server side setting called something like ForceEncryption this is always set to true on Azure, but for on-prem SQL instances it can be set by the DBA. If this setting is true it does not matter what option the client chooses. If it's false the client can ask for an unencrypted connection (ideally you'd probably only ever do this if you had old legacy client applications)