Forum Discussion

Anonymous's avatar
Anonymous
Not applicable
9 years ago

Power BI Secured Connectivity

I am really thrilled to see the power of PowerBI as Self Service BI..My client is in Insurance domain working with Highly Confidential data for reporting. They have on-premise SQL Databases (Relational and Analytics). Need some insights on how it can establish secure connectivity with on-premise databases. This is will help business to take the advantage of Power BI. Appreciate if anyone from Micorosft can throw some light on this. Thanks!

Need Help

6 Replies

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous
    Not applicable
    9 years ago

    I am really thrilled to see the power of PowerBI as Self Service BI..My client is in Insurance domain working with Highly Confidential data for reporting. They have in-premise SQL Databases (Relational and Analytics). Need some insights on how it can establish secure connectivity (over SSL) with on-premise databases. This is will help business to take the advantage of Power BI. Appreciate if anyone from Micorosft can throw some light on this. Thanks!

  • Greg_Deckler's avatar
    Greg_Deckler
    Community Champion
    9 years ago

    Probably the most secure route to go would be to install the Enterprise Gateway and use a Direct Query query to the on-premises database. See the Power BI Security post here: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-admin-power-bi-security/

     

    Actually, I would argue that your data would be more secure if you stored it in the cloud in Azure SQL DB or Azure SQL as IaaS versus an on-premises data center, but I might be in the minority on that. Bottom line, Microsoft's cloud is more secure than just about anyone's data center, IMHO.

    • Anonymous's avatar
      Anonymous
      Not applicable
      9 years ago

      Thanks for your reply. No, the infrastructure and solution is already in place for the client. So we need to go for a solution that works with on-premise databases. We need to be sure on secure connectivity (like SSL) before we propose Power BI to the client. I will explore the link referred by you and get back to you with further queries.

      • Anonymous's avatar
        Anonymous
        Not applicable
        9 years ago

        Hi Anonymous,

        You can enable SSL encryption for your SQL Server instance following the instructions in this KB article, then connect to the SQL Server instance from Power BI Desktop. This way, communications between the Power BI Desktop and SQL Server are encrypted.

        What you need to note is that you would need to copy SSL certificate for the SQL Server to the machine running Power BI Desktop and import it to Trusted Root Certification Authorities store. Also take a look at the server name in the SSL certificate and connect to SQL Server from Power BI Desktop using the same server name, otherwise you will get connectivity error.


        Moreover, you are able to add SQL Server data source under gateway as long as you copy SSL certificate for the SQL Server to the machine running gateway and import it to Trusted Root Certification Authorities store. For more details, please take a look at this similar blog.


        Thanks,
        Lydia Zhang