Ping Identity Data Governance

Protecting sensitive customer data is increasingly difficult as organizations store information across multiple locations and business units, while security teams, database administrators, and developers face conflicting approaches to securing it. Beyond internal access control, governments and consumers are asserting rights over how personal data is collected, used, shared, and deleted. Privacy regulations are expanding, highlighted by GDPR’s consent-driven control for EU residents and US responses to high-profile breaches and misuse. Vermont’s law requires data brokers to register, disclose collection and opt-out mechanisms, notify breaches, and provides legal recourse; California’s Consumer Privacy Act was enacted to introduce new consumer rights and was expected to take effect in 2020. Momentum is expected to push toward a more uniform US federal approach in the long term.

A parallel trend is consumer-accessible data via APIs, such as Australia’s Consumer Data Right and the EU’s PSD2, which enables third-party access to bank data through secure APIs with customer consent. As digital services become more complex and integration-heavy, demand grows for developer-centric APIs and for protecting sensitive data at the API layer, often via proxy-style gateways.

Ping Identity’s PingDataGovernance addresses these pressures with dynamic, fine-grained authorization and API-layer data protection. It uses a policy administration UI (via an embedded Symphonic OEM component) for drag-and-drop policy creation, separation of duties (administrators configure data sources; business users define rules), and policy testing with graphical evaluation traces. Capabilities include consent enforcement, delegated access controls that limit visible attributes and search scope, and API response filtering (redaction, obfuscation, blocking). Deployment supports sideband integration with API gateways, operation as an API gateway, and SCIM-based access to protect directories and data sources. It supports OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, LDAP v3, and SCIM 2.0, integrates with PingDirectory, PingFederate, and PingOne, and can be deployed on-premises, in clouds, or containerized—though it is primarily geared to structured data and has some out-of-the-box connector limits.

• GDPR provides Europeans rights to control personal information collected by organizations through consent mechanisms.
• Vermont requires data brokers to register, explain opt-out, disclose what is collected, report when data has been breached, and enables legal recourse for abuse.
• The California Consumer Privacy Act was enacted and was expected to take effect in 2020.
• Australia introduced the Consumer Data Right in 2017 to give greater control over data via APIs.
• PSD2 allows third-party providers to access customer data at financial institutions via secure APIs after customer consent.
• Ping Identity was founded in 2002 with an initial focus on identity federation.
• PingDataGovernance embeds Symphonic as an OEM component for the policy administration user interface.
• PingDataGovernance supports OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect, LDAP v3, and SCIM 2.0.
• PingDataGovernance integrates out-of-the-box with PingDirectory and also with non-Ping directories compliant with LDAP v3.
• PingDataGovernance can be deployed on-premises, in public or private cloud environments, and in containerized deployments.

• “Privacy laws, regulations, and initiatives are proliferating to address the growing concerns over the use and control over personal data.”
• “This is driving the rapidly growing demand for exposing and consuming APIs which are developer-centric.”
• “By exposing information via APIs, it allows for better data access, workflows, and orchestration capabilities across environments.”
• “PingDataGovernance acts as the policy enforcement point between the access request and the data itself.”
• “The graphical policy administration interface provides drag and drop functionality when building, or modifying the access policies with the UI.”
• “This approach relieves the software developer and database administrator from having to hard code the policy rules and conditions, which can be error-prone and hard to maintain.”
• “For a given API call in which a policy has been defined, PingDataGovernance has the ability to filter the API call’s response by obfuscating, removing, or blocking specific data attributes.”
• “PingDataGovernance can act as an API gateway in front of microservice APIs or in front of any API for that matter.”
• “PingDataGovernance is primarily focused on structured data.”
• “PingDataGovernance provides the tools needed to protect against the data compliance challenges we see today and is worth considering when evaluating structured data compliance solutions for the directory and API.”