Power BI Process for company not being able to download desktop for most users

[phi2134]

Hi all, we are currently in the process of developing our companies plan on how we are going to implement Power BI and we are possibly running into some roadblocks from how we originally wanted to do it.

We will have an Azure data lake which will use AtScale to build cubes, Power BI will then pull data from the AtScale cubes for reporting.  We were first expecting all Power BI Pro Users to use the desktop version of Power BI to do minimal data modeling thanks to AtScale and then build and publish their reports.  

We just found out that due to security concerns we might not be able to get Power BI Desktop downloaded for this larger set of people, and only a small subset of around 5-10 will be able to get it.   We are thinking that these 5-10 people can publish datasets to workspaces and the rest of the original Pro Users can use Power BI service to create the reports.

We are slightly concerned with this approach because we dont know the full difference of whats available and it might put more work on the now 5-10 desktop users.

Can someone tell us their experience if they have had this same issues and what differences that have found in the two ways of developing reports?  

One thing that we have found already that we dont like is not being able to import a report theme and keep the report feel consistant.  The new dashboard theme just isnt doing it for us in terms of the full look and feel.

[Seth_C_Bauer]

@phi2134 What are the security concerns? The desktop is by far the better tool to build reports. Unless you are able to do everything in AtScale (which it doesn't sound like you can) then you need to be able to at minumum build measures... and yeah, there are a lot of other pain points in building reports in the service. The report authors need the Desktop.

Unless your company is going to lock down literally everything outside of the network any user that can download the desktop on some other machine, can log into the the Service and deploy reports. 
Rarily are "security concerns" a valid reason to not allow people to do reporting. Do you allow Excel? Then that is worse than any other reporting tool because your business users are already shipping uncontrolled datasets all over the company and elsewhere all the time. Make the individuals raising the "concerns" be specific, because otherwise in my experiance it is usually someone elses lack of experiance that kills reporting projects, not legitimate concerns. (Sorry for the rant, I hit this all the time, and it is rarily based on fact. It typically has to do with IT feeling like they are losing control, when the reality is that they never had nearly as much as they think") - This coming from a guy with a traditional enterprise data background.