What Is the Purpose of the Power BI Data Gateway?

Building dashboards in Power BI is a fantastic way to visualize your business data, but what happens when that data doesn't live in the cloud? If your most valuable information is stored on a local server inside your company's network, you need a secure way to connect it to the cloud-based Power BI Service. This article explains the Power BI Data Gateway, showing you what it is, why it's necessary, and how it safely bridges the gap between your on-premises data and your online reports.

What Exactly Is the Power BI Data Gateway?

Think of the Power BI Data Gateway as a secure bridge or a highly trusted courier. It's a free software application that you install on a computer within your local network. Its job is to sit quietly in the background and facilitate a secure connection between your on-premises data sources (like a SQL server in your office) and Microsoft's cloud services, including Power BI, Power Apps, and others.

Without the gateway, Power BI Service would have no way to access or refresh data from sources it can't see on the public internet. The data analysis tool is cloud-based software, so it's not designed to know or have access to what's on your local drives or a secure corporate network drive. This crucial bridge makes it possible to create dynamic, auto-refreshing reports based on data that must remain within your company's firewall for security or policy reasons.

Common on-premises data sources that require a gateway include:

• SQL Server Databases
• Oracle Databases
• Files located on a local network share (like Excel spreadsheets or CSV files)
• SharePoint Server (on-premises version)
• SAP HANA
• MySQL Databases installed on a local server

Why You Need a "Bridge" to Your Local Data

At first, it might seem unnecessarily complicated. Why can't Power BI’s cloud service just connect directly to your server? The answer comes down to security and network architecture.

Your company's internal network is protected by firewalls. These act as digital security guards, preventing unauthorized access from the outside internet. This is a popular measure to protect sensitive business information from potential hackers or cyber-attacks and to ensure the information isn't indexed by web crawling bots. While this measure is crucial to protecting company information, it creates barriers when accessing this information for internal business reasons. If Power BI Service tried to directly contact your local SQL server, the firewall would block it as an unidentified external request.

The On-Premises Data Gateway solves this problem by acting as a sanctioned intermediary. You install it on a machine inside your network. Here's more about its function:

• It Initiates Outbound Connections: The gateway securely connects outward, from your servers to Azure Service Bus. Firewalls typically treat this data flow as safe due to the preprogrammed and authorized connection to Microsoft's cloud.
• It Encrypts Queries: When a user refreshes a report in Power BI Service, the query and credentials are encrypted and sent to the gateway.
• It Handles the "Last-Mile" Translation: The gateway decrypts the request, fetches the specific data from your local server, re-encrypts it, and sends it back through Azure to Power BI Service, where it populates on your custom dashboard reports.

In short, the gateway doesn’t move your entire database to the cloud. Instead, it securely ferries the results of specific queries, ensuring your reports are fresh without compromising your backend server network's security.

The Two Gateway Modes: Standard vs. Personal

When you download the Power BI Gateway installer from Microsoft's download library, you’ll be prompted to choose between two modes: Standard or Personal. Each serves different purposes, and the right choice depends on your business goals and how large your internal operation is.

Standard Mode (Formerly "On-premises data gateway")

This mode is recommended for nearly all organizations or larger businesses. It is central and scalable for your organization.

• Intended For Teams: It's designed for multiple users across various Power BI, Power Apps, and Azure instances. Multiple people can publish dashboards via the same gateway.
• Runs as a Windows Service: Unlike Personal mode's application, Standard mode functions as a dedicated Windows service, ensuring reliability, especially for automated scheduled syncs.
• More Capabilities: Supports scheduled refresh, DirectQuery, and Live Connections. This allows users to analyze real-time data without storing information in Power BI.

Personal Mode (Formerly "On-premises data gateway personal mode")

This mode is intended for a single user, such as an individual analyst or a freelancer.

• Intended for Solo Users: Specifically meant for analysts or users who work alone and are the only ones creating reports from on-premises information sources.

Final Thoughts

The Power BI Data Gateway functions as a bridge to help you access your on-premise data using Microsoft's Power BI data visualization dashboards. By installing a standard or personal mode gateway on your local server, you can securely unlock features such as real-time data analysis and automatic scheduling of data syncs while maintaining security by protecting your local server from the outside web. Learning how to use these gateway types equips you with the tools needed to make decisions and generate insights based on the most up-to-date information.

While having the right tools will make your data management process as easy as possible, they are only beneficial if we know how to use them effectively. For this reason, we created Graphed, a powerful AI data analyst that can connect different sources so you can create dynamic, professional dashboards and reports using natural language. This empowers business owners at any career stage to make confident decisions without needing to learn complex tools.