PowerBI hosting: Gateway service

[Mofizur]

Hi Team,

We were running our SAP HANA on-premise and had installed a PowerBI Gateway on one of our On-Premise VM inside DMZ. Everything was/ is working as expected. 

Now as per compmany's strategy we have migrated our SAP HANA to our own subcription in Azure and we are still using the On-Premise PowerBI Gatwway from our old Data Center.

Now my dumb question is do we still need the Gateway Service  to get  data into the Premium workspaces because services can generally connect to cloud data sources ( SAP hana is installed in Azure VM) without a gateway, Isn't it? Gateway is  only necessary for the data sources that are outside of Azure ? Or because this is our own private subscription and I am sure we have firewall etc so it is a best practice to use the PowerBI Gateway? Like provisiona new VM in Azure and install/ configure it over there?

Thank you so much for your response on this please. 

Thanks,

Mofizur

Do we still need the Gateway Service  to get  NGRP data into the Premium workspace ? I have in mind that the Gateway is  only necessary for the data sources that are outside of Azure (but now NGRP is in Azure); we would only need the Gateway for local sources (but no firm actually uses local data ?)

[Mofizur]

Thank you so much @otravers for your quick response and clearing my concept.

Thanks,

Mofizur

[otravers · Accepted solution]

An Azure VM is considered Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), it's not SaaS/PaaS. As such, software that you install and manage in an Azure VM is typically seen as "on premises" from the perspective of Power BI and still requires the data gateway. You'll want to move the gateway to a VM in the same network as your Hana gateway to reduce latency.