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ADLS Gateway Question

  • March 11, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 14 views

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Why is an on prem gateway necessary for the connection between ADLS Parquet datasets and the end user’s Power BI instance? 

2 replies

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  • Do Gooder (Employee)
  • March 16, 2026

Hello! There are a few reasons an on-prem data gateway is needed

  1. Power BI dataset requirements; The IFS Analysis Models Power BI solution creates datasets that reference Parquet files in ADLS Gen2. To refresh these datasets via Power BI Service, their data sources must be bound to a gateway and this is done through the customer’s Service Principal.
  2. Security; ADLS Gen2 endpoint is not publicly accessible and ADLS cannot reliably whitelist Power BI IPs, hence, a gateway is needed for the Power BI Service to safely connect with ADLS
  3. Our automation (binding data sources during upload of reports) relies on the setup where data gateway is used. Without this, it is not possible to upload reports in our solution.

We are planning to investigate other options to refresh datasets, and redesign, and improve our architecture. 


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  • Author
  • Do Gooder (Customer)
  • March 16, 2026

Hello! There are a few reasons an on-prem data gateway is needed

  1. Power BI dataset requirements; The IFS Analysis Models Power BI solution creates datasets that reference Parquet files in ADLS Gen2. To refresh these datasets via Power BI Service, their data sources must be bound to a gateway and this is done through the customer’s Service Principal.
  2. Security; ADLS Gen2 endpoint is not publicly accessible and ADLS cannot reliably whitelist Power BI IPs, hence, a gateway is needed for the Power BI Service to safely connect with ADLS
  3. Our automation (binding data sources during upload of reports) relies on the setup where data gateway is used. Without this, it is not possible to upload reports in our solution.

We are planning to investigate other options to refresh datasets, and redesign, and improve our architecture. 

 

Yes, however, by introducing a Fabric Lakehouse as an intermediary between ADLS Gen2 and Power BI, wouldn’t we avoid the need for any on prem infrastructure? IFS would still land Parquet data in ADLS as the supported extraction mechanism, but Power BI wouldn’t connect to ADLS directly. Instead, data would be ingested into Fabric Lakehouse to be secured, typed, and modeled. Power BI would then consume data natively from Fabric using Direct Lake or the SQL endpoint.

Am I incorrect in the assumption that this would avoid the need for on prem infrastructure?