what on-premise data sources are supported?

[prokurors]

I would like to use Power BI as a frontend for BI of my application.

My current customers are some individuals from a big corporations and they have very strict rules about data security - so all data has to be on premise and should not be stored anywere outside the company.

1) Can Power BI be used just as an interface (that it queries on-premise data and displays them in the defined reports) so that it does not store anything on a cloud side?

2) What is needed for Power BI retrieve data from local intranet files? Is it enough that the current user, that queries data from Power BI has access to those files? Or is there some configuration involved to grant Power BI access to those files?

[ashishrj]

@prokurors Find the answers to your question below:

1. As long as you are developing your reports in Power BI Desktop Tool / Excel, nothing is going to cloud as everything is local. You can share this pbix files in which you have created report across users but they need to install Dekstop Tool to view the same.

2. To retrieve data, firstly Power BI Desktop tool sould support that particular data source and user should have access to the source. No other configuration is required.

Hope this helps!

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

You could use the PBIX file generated by Desktop as the "interface". You could also use Excel with the Power plug-ins and put that in a SharePoint site and use Office web apps or Excel web services to display it. You could also use Pyramid Analytics server to "publish" Power BI Desktop files and in SQL Server 2016 publish those files to SSRS.

Probably depends on the intranet and what authentication it supports, OAuth, Windows, Anonymous, etc. Should not be any configuration since you are not publishing to the Service, the gateway wouldn't really enter into the picture.