PII Catalog REST API: Real-Time Mapping of Sensitive Data

The request hit the network. The PII Catalog REST API responded in milliseconds, delivering a complete map of every field containing sensitive data. No guesswork. No wasted calls. Just truth, in JSON.

A PII Catalog REST API is the control point for identifying, labeling, and querying personally identifiable information across your systems. It gives you a real-time index of where data lives and what types it contains. With a single endpoint, you can pull the catalog, filter by data type, system, or sensitivity level, and feed that intelligence into scanning tools, access controls, or compliance reports.

Unlike manual audits that age fast, a PII Catalog REST API updates as your data changes. It can integrate with databases, file storage, message queues, and cloud apps. You can poll the API on a schedule, or push changes to it as they occur. The structure is predictable: authenticated requests, parameters for scope and filters, and standard response codes.

Key capabilities include:

• Enumerating all datasets with flagged PII fields.
• Retrieving metadata such as source system, schema, and classification.
• Triggering new scans or refreshing existing results.
• Exporting inventories to downstream security or privacy platforms.

In practice, teams use it to automate GDPR and CCPA reporting, feed data discovery dashboards, or backstop DLP policies. By integrating with CI/CD pipelines, you can even block deployments that introduce untracked PII. Performance matters here: a good API returns large catalogs without timing out, supports pagination, and handles concurrent requests reliably.

Security for a PII Catalog REST API must be strict. Use API keys or OAuth, encrypt data in transit, and apply role-based access to prevent leaks. Keep audit logs for every read and write. Performance metrics and health-check endpoints help keep the service stable during high traffic.

If your systems hold sensitive customer data, a PII Catalog REST API turns chaos into a maintained ledger. It scales with your infrastructure and cuts compliance work from weeks to seconds.

See how this works in practice. Try it live on hoop.dev and run a PII Catalog REST API in minutes.