The on-premises data gateway isn’t just for enabling Power BI Service cloud-hosted components to pull data from private local network resources.

True, Microsoft’s short description of the gateway says that it is “a bridge” which “provides quick and secure data transfer between on-premise data, which is data that isn’t in the cloud, and several Microsoft cloud services.” However, beyond that description, there are at least three additional key uses for this gateway which are of particular pertinence in the Power BI world.