best platform for cloud based Power BI

[bryandhines]

We are a consulting group that works with about 300 healthcare clients.  Our clients have asked us to create specific custom dashboards for them. We want to use Power BI as our tool.  We would harnass the data and build the visualizations.  The client would have their own login to just view the visualizations.  What I need to know is what is the best way to accomplish this?  Our clients are all over the United States.  They are independent of one another so their data is confidential therfore separate databases. Due to HIPAA regulations their data cannot comingle.  Some have asked for real time visualizations.  We would typically connect to phone systems, Amazon EC2, other SQL databases.  I was thinking something like having an Azure server running BI Desktop, but I don't know how many instances we can have (if we need them), computing power, cost, etc. What is the best way to accomplish a cloud based, real time power BI solution?

[dnprock]

@bryandhines you can create your dashboards with Power BI and publish it to the web. Then use wrapper viz hosting service, like vida.io, to provide login and control access to the dashboards (disclaimer: I work at vida.io). We can deploy dedicated instances of vida.io on Azure or AWS. Here's a Power BI embed example:

https://vida.io/documents/Z8t2NepoNmn5GwkGv

A drawback of this approach is that your Power BI dashboards are visible on the web. If your users does network inspection and copies the Power BI dashboard URL, they'll be able to share the dashboard link without login.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@bryandhines Your description sounds like you would host the data, have a central login, and each client would see their own information. If that is the case, the only route I see is using Power BI Embedded which utilizes the Desktop, and a custom application which would control user access. 

This scenerio would require you to stand up an Application that your clients could access and then visualize the Power BI reports.

The Power BI Service with dashboards and sharing is for use within a company. It isn't designed, nor does it support, you using it as an extension to service your clients.

Let me know if I'm mis-understanding something, and I can clarify a bit more.

[bryandhines]

Correct, we would host the data.  I envisioned the client with their own Power BI login that was specific to their dataset/visualizations.

Azure, Amazon and a host of others allow you to set up virtual machines.  Where each one of these machines may have its own power BI desktop.  I wasn't sure if that would be a good solution for how BI operates today or not.  It may be cost prohibitive.  I'm still trying to feel out the right solution.  Or if Power BI is even the right tool.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@bryandhines The only reason i don't see that working is because each Power BI implementation is tied to each companies tenant/domain...

Take a look here, this should give you an idea of how Power BI is set up on the back end.

Others may have a different idea, but if you were thinking that it was a product you could spin up and configure for each client using the Power BI Service, I'm fairly certain it won't work like that.