Power BI Model Security Demystified: Ensuring Confidentiality
Access restriction for analytics reports is critical for maintaining the security, accuracy, and utility of data.. Access restriction for analytics reports is crucial for safeguarding data security, ensuring compliance, enhancing data governance, and supporting informed decision-making. Without it, organizations risk exposing sensitive data, violating regulations, and making poor decisions due to data inaccuracies or misuse.
In Power BI, reports are stored in workspaces. When you create a workspace, only you can access it at first. You can control who else can access your workspace by clicking the Manage access button in the workspace view.
There are four types of roles in a workspace:
- Viewer : Can only look at and read the reports.
- Contributor : Can add reports to the workspace, as well as copy, edit, delete, and update dashboards.
- Member : Can add Contributors and Viewers and manage permissions for datasets in the workspace.
- Admin : Can add or remove people and change or delete the workspace.
%20in%20Power%20BI.%20The%20image%20shows%20a%20central%20data%20table%20with%20three%20distinct%20rows%20la.webp){kind=spacer}
- By default, a data model has no roles.
- A data model without roles means that users (who have permission to query the data model) have access to all model data.
- It's possible to define a role that includes no rules. In this case, the role provides access to all rows of all model tables. This role set up would be suitable for an admin user who is allowed to view all data.
- We can create, validate, and manage roles in Power BI Desktop.
- It’s common to set up Power BI to enforce rules that filter dimension tables, allowing model relationships to efficiently propagate those filters to fact tables.
- Rule expressions are evaluated within row context. Row context means the expression is evaluated for each row using the column values of that row.
- RLS only restricts data access for users with Viewer permissions. It doesn't apply to Admins, Members, or Contributors.
- We can configure RLS for data models imported into Power BI with Power BI.
- Service principals can't be added to an RLS role. Accordingly, RLS isn't applied for apps using a service principal as the final effective identity.
- Only Import and DirectQuery connections are supported. Live connections to Analysis Services are handled in the on-premises model.
Published on:
Learn more
Related posts
How To Get The Details Of Power BI Operations Seen In The Capacity Metrics App
It’s the week of Fabcon Europe and you’re about to be overwhelmed with new Fabric feature announcements. However there is a new bl...
Deprecation of Power BI Integration within SharePoint Lists and Libraries
Today, we are announcing the retirement of the Power BI integration within SharePoint lists and libraries. This change impacts customers who c...
AI and Agentic Development for Power BI
New Fabric Tenant Setting: “Set alert” Button Visibility for Power BI Users
A new Microsoft Fabric tenant setting will make the “Set alert” button visible to all Power BI web users, enabling them to create Fabric Activ...
What Happens When Power BI Direct Lake Semantic Models Hit Guardrails?
Direct Lake mode in Power BI allows you to build semantic models on very large volumes of data, but because it is still an in-memory database ...
Power BI Beginner's Tutorial (2025)
Faster DAX in Power BI
Performance Testing Power BI Direct Lake Models Revisited: Ensuring Worst-Case Performance
Two years ago I wrote a detailed post on how to do performance testing for Direct Lake semantic models. In that post I talked about how import...