Apply data governance principles
Ensuring the quality and security of your organization's data is critical. Power BI provides tools to help you manage and protect your content effectively. Let's explore two essential practices for maintaining trustworthy and secure Power BI content. The first one is about endorsing your content, which helps users identify high-quality data. The second practice involves applying sensitivity labels to protect sensitive information.
Endorse your content
Endorsing your Power BI content is a crucial step in ensuring that users can easily identify and trust high-quality, authoritative data. Power BI provides two types of endorsements: promotion and certification. These endorsements help users navigate through large volumes of content and locate reliable resources for their needs.
Promotion allows content owners or members with write permissions in a workspace to highlight content they believe is valuable and ready for broader use. This collaborative approach encourages the sharing of useful data across the organization. Promoted content is marked with a badge, making it easily recognizable in lists and searches.
Certification, on the other hand, signifies that the content meets the organization's quality standards and is deemed authoritative. Only authorized reviewers, as defined by the Power BI administrator, can certify content. Certification ensures that users can rely on the content for critical decision-making. Certified content is also labeled with a distinct badge and is prioritized in searches.
By endorsing content, whether through promotion or certification, organizations can foster trust and improve the discoverability of valuable Power BI resources. Badges are visible in Power BI Desktop when creating a new report and searching for existing semantic models. This visibility ensures that report creators can easily identify and select high-quality, endorsed datasets, streamlining the report-building process and promoting the use of trusted data sources.
Apply a sensitivity label
Applying sensitivity labels in Power BI is a key step in ensuring that sensitive data is appropriately classified and protected throughout its lifecycle. Sensitivity labels, powered by Microsoft Purview Information Protection, allow users to tag content with labels such as "Confidential" or "Highly Confidential," which help enforce data protection policies without hindering collaboration or productivity.
To apply a sensitivity label in the Power BI service, navigate to the desired report, dashboard, semantic model, or dataflow. Use the "More options" menu to access the settings, where you can select the appropriate sensitivity label from the dropdown list under the "Sensitivity label" section. Once applied, the label is visible in the workspace and persists when the content is exported to supported formats like Excel, PowerPoint, or PDF. This ensures that the protection settings associated with the label travel with the data, safeguarding it even outside Power BI.
In Power BI Desktop, sensitivity labels can be applied directly to .pbix files. Simply select the "Sensitivity" option from the toolbar and choose the appropriate label. The label is then displayed in the status bar and is applied to the file when saved. If the file is later published to the Power BI service, the label is inherited by the associated report and semantic model. Conversely, when downloading a labeled file from the service, the most restrictive label between the report and semantic model is applied to the .pbix file.
By applying sensitivity labels, organizations can ensure that their data remains secure and compliant with internal and external regulations, while also providing clear guidance to users on how to handle sensitive content.