Power BI Services and Management Roadmap 2021

• Premium’s new architecture improves performance, potentially reducing cost and administrative efforts.
• Enterprise-class updates change data models limits and introduce tools to control report life cycles.
• New licensing options will help small to medium-sized deployments that need Premium features.
• A shift in Microsoft’s on-premises report hosting strategy impacts the long-term viability of Power BI Report Server.

Power BI continues to mature, with the development team now focusing on improving the underlying platform, including more advanced data management and data query features, and simplifying deployment and administrative tasks. To get the most from their investment, enterprises need to adopt an approach that includes proper architecture, security, and deployment planning; training for IT support staff; and ongoing administrative maintenance and performance tuning.

This report focuses on Power BI back-end platforms that are the repositories for reports, datasets, and other content, and also provide processing and controls for security, data access, and report rendering and delivery. (For more details, see the illustration “Power BI Back-end Hosting Overview.”)