I have several public forms need to use lookups for static sets of data, like the 100 departments and divisions.  On our internal forms server, we have access to our sql db so this is easy enough, however, our security team does not want to have access to our database from a public server.  It was recommended that I use excel sheets to do these lookups, but as I look across the website, i read person after person recommending to not use Excel.  These are also much older posts, and I know at the last Empower it was said you need to use Excel for form lookups if on the Cloud (we are on prem web based.)

Any insight or other solution is appreciated, however, setting up a sql db is out of the question.