Prevent PBIX from unauthorized download

[mluong212]

Hi all,

I am new to power BI and I am wondering if there is anyone know how to prevent your power bi file from being downloaded after publishing them to the organization's workspace?

I have created some dashboards for my organization and published them to the organization's workspace (not the authoring workspace). People can view my dashboards in the workspace but are not able to modify them. However, they can still download the pbix file and see all my queries and data.

Is there a way for me to prevent internal people from downloading the pbix file?

Thanks,

ML

[GilbertQ · Accepted solution]

Hi @mluong212

One of the things that you can do is instead of making the users members of the App Workspace, rather let them consume the data via the Apps. This will mean then that they get a Read-Only copy. Which will not give them the option to download the PBIX file.

Or what you can do is to Share the Dashboards with the users, this once again is Read-Only which will mean that they will not be able to download the PBIX file.

[mluong212]

Thank you for responding guavaq - I am looking into making App workspace right now.

[cplesner]

Problem with this is that users then can't create their own reports based on the dataset, or ?

I have a scenario where we would like to maintain the Dataset and let users connect to the workspace and create their own reports. It's not possible today, unless they are members with edit rights to the workspace - which then means that they can download the pbix...

[kensik]

@cplesnerI have the same scenario. I would like to let the users create reports on the dataset. But i would like to prevent that they can download the dataset as pbix-file. Do you know a solution for that?

[cplesner]

unfortunately MS haven't provided a way to secure an PowerBI model yet while also letting users create reports on top of it. Only solution you have is to import the PowerBI model into an Azure SSAS model.
Hopefully MS will spend some time on this as it would be expected in a corporate setting 🙂

[kensik]

Hi @cplesner, thank you for your reply and a merry christmas to you.