A notification pops up on your system: you have a new, red exclamation point, high-priority email. Before you can even read it, your phone rings. It’s your boss. “I just emailed you. We just discovered that column X in our database contains restricted PII that we can’t be storing. The DBAs are deleting the column as we speak. Please be sure it is gone from reports and your system immediately!” You open Microsoft Power BI Desktop, hit refresh, and the column disappears from the dataset because has been removed from the server; then you save the file. But is column really gone, or could there be remnants of its data left on your system?
A prospective client asks you to look at a PBIX file. When you’re done, to minimize liability you don’t want someone else’s data or credentials left sitting on your system, so you delete the file. Are its contents and associated credentials really all gone?
A coworker needs advice on a report, handing it to you on a thumb drive, with the file marked read-only. You open the PBIX file directly from the external drive, give your thoughts then close the file without saving it. Since the drive was external and the file read only, the file was contained exclusively on the flash drive—or was it?
Whether for security purposes, regulatory compliance’s sake, good business practices or liability management, having a sense for whether and, if so, how widely, Power BI spreads report data on your system is a good thing.
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