Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello!

I'm a beginner in Power Automate.

I would like to retrieve data from a corporate web service (which makes requests to an internal database) with a Power Apps app. This web service is available only on our internal networks. There are sensitive data in there, so we have to be careful with it, in accordance with GDPR applied in our country. A few months ago, I heard about On-premises data gateway and followed this tutorial that meets my requirements. I have managed to install it in a server containing the web service and created some flows that are working well.

But I had to ask myself this following question: is it a good practice to do so regarding the security? I made some research. Yeah, Microsoft expertise can be definitely trusted but I'm still not convinced..
I don't know if there are better alternatives. A SharePoint developer (in real life) suggested us to use a provider-hosted SharePoint add-in hosted in an internal server instead. Is it even feasible to use Power Automate with it? I couldn't find information about it.

Sorry if I was vague, but I need clarification.
Thanks in advance,

Bernard

Categories:

Using connectors

Hello Team,

I appreciate you asking this question on the community, SECURITY should never be taken lightly and your concern is top notch.

Yes, I can say that the On premise gateway is very very secure.

This is how the communication is driven behind the scenes (trying to play with the words in the documentation and make this easy for you)-

Whenever a request is made via the cloud service (PowerApps or PowerAutomate), the cloud service creates a query and the encrypted credentials for the on-premises data source. The query and credentials are sent to the gateway queue for processing.
The gateway cloud service analyzes the query and pushes the request to Azure Service Bus.
Azure Service Bus sends the pending requests to the gateway (that is installed and setup by your Administrator)
The gateway gets the query, decrypts the credentials, and connects to one or more data sources with those credentials.
The gateway sends the query to the data source to be run.
The results are sent from the data source back to the gateway and then to the cloud service. The service then uses the results.

This is the best design in terms of security and I would say that nothing seems fishy over here, so YES GATEWAY IS EXTREMELY SECURE.

More details on the official documentation-

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-onprem-indepth

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-onprem-indepth#authentication-to-on-premises-data-sources

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