Business Intelligence
Power BI Report Server
The on-premises Power BI portal, for an analytics estate that has to stay inside the organisation's own infrastructure.
Product
Power BI Report ServerPower BI Report Server is the on-premises portal used where an organisation has to keep its analytics estate inside its own infrastructure for regulatory reasons. It publishes Power BI reports and paginated reports from a server the organisation runs, at the end of an on-premises chain: SQL Server Integration Services for ETL, SQL Server for the data warehouse, and SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular for the semantic model. The design intent matches the cloud path, so a later move to the Power BI Service is a migration rather than a restart.
How it works
- The regulatory position is confirmed first, because it is the reason the estate stays on-premises and it decides what may leave the organisation at all.
- SQL Server Integration Services carries the ingestion and ETL from the source systems.
- SQL Server holds the data warehouse, modelled in the same layers the cloud path uses.
- SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular holds the semantic model and its agreed measures.
- Reports and paginated reports are published to Power BI Report Server, with access controlled through the organisation's own directory.
- The model and the pipelines are documented against their cloud equivalents, so a later move to the Power BI Service is a migration rather than a rebuild.
A problem it solves
Regulatory reporting is assembled by hand from several systems every period, which is slow and easy to get wrong, and the same regulation is the reason the data cannot be held outside the organisation's own infrastructure. Power BI Report Server puts that reporting on a governed on-premises chain, so the figures come from one modelled warehouse and the submission is produced from a report rather than retyped.