SQLBits 2024
Automating Power BI Governance: How dynamic security groups can solve 95% of your sharing needs
In this session we will describe how to ensure that Entra ID (aka Azure Active Directory) has up-to-date information about the users of the organization and how to build dynamic security groups that will make sharing Power BI Apps and other artifacts much faster without needing maintenance over time.
A basic aim of Power BI Governance is that information reaches everyone to whom the information is relevant and it does not reach other people. Sharing individually or through static security groups is a nightmare in large organizations, where people change departments and new employees are joining all the time. Building dynamic security groups based on organizational data, such as department or role can solve a big chunk of all sharing needs of the organization. Before relying on such groups though, is good to verify that the Entra ID (fka Azure Active Directory) user attributes are in sync with HR data. In this session we'll discuss how to extract Entra ID metadata, how to compare it with HR data, and a possible implementation of the department based security groups. Once a Power BI App or any other artifact is shared using such security groups, maintenance of the groups is indirectly done by HR so there's no overhead for Power BI Administrators or content creators.