Data protection issues in Power BI reports should be addressed through approaches that are typically considered within the scope of GDPR's seven principles. The implementation of this process may be facilitated by the application of Microsoft Purview in tandem with the available features of Power BI. Below is a description of how the elements described above fit together:
1. Lawfulness, Fairness and Transparency
Justifying the use of personal data or any data under the EU regulation cannot be overstated. Therefore, it is important to explain why Processing Data Involves Power BI on some data. It is worthwhile using Microsoft Purview's compliance manager; in other words, it helps explain how data activities comply with the GDPR. In addition, Power BI provides sensitivity labeling at the report or dataset level, aiding in informing users of the report and its data's sensitivity level.
2. Purpose Limitation
Limit the use of data in Power BI to the mentioned purposes only. In Microsoft Purview's data catalog, appropriately tagged datasets can be identified for their purposes. The Power BI solution works with PurviewPurview so that whenever a dataset is discovered, only those with access granted to the data can view it, thus preventing any inappropriate use of the data.
3. Data Minimization
Employ row-level security (RLS) in Power BI and data reduction processes to keep the amount of data processed to a minimum. For instance, load only the fields required for the report and apply Power Query to exclude fields that are confidential or not needed. Identifiable information can be safeguarded using data masking or obfuscation techniques such as dynamic data masking.
4. Accuracy
In all cases, ensure the dataset is accurate by verifying existing data sets before integrating them into Power BI. Dataflows, which are part of Power BI, and any data quality tools available in Microsoft Purview will ensure that no old and wrong data is in a report and that only clean and correct bin data is used in reports.
5. Restrictions on storage space
Employ Power BI's policies on data retention to control the period of storage. In addition, Microsoft Purview's capabilities of records management should be leveraged to apply retention schedules for datasets that support Power BI and automatically archive or purge in existence as appropriate.
6. Integrity and confidentiality (Security)
Power BI operates with Azure Active Directory (AAD) to control access so that only authorized persons can access the reports. Beyond this, Microsoft Purview ensures compliance by requiring access control measures to extend to encryption, logging, and tracking of access to data to enhance security and implement Power BI's row-level security (RLS) and column-level security mechanisms to limit access to particular fields containing sensitive information.
7. Responsibility
Take responsibility by using the audit trails in Microsoft Purview to show who accessed which data and made changes to which Power BI reports. With reports on the activity monitoring features available in Power BI, it is possible to give a report on the users of the sensitive data and provide evidence that meeting audit requirements was not an empty pledge.
To implement Powerful governance around sensitive data with compliance, it is important to consider the features of Power BI in conjunction with the principles of GDPR and Microsoft Purview governance solutions. This way, every reporting workflow is complete with data protection, privacy, and even transparency.
