Specifying processing locations

With the ability to specify a region in which to perform your Sensitive Data Protection operations, you can control where your potentially sensitive data is processed. This document explains the concept of Sensitive Data Protection processing location and shows you how to specify a region.

To see a list of supported regions and multi-regions, see Sensitive Data Protection locations.

About regions and multi-regions

A region is a specific geographic place, such as the western United States or northeast Asia. A multi-region location (or just multi-region) is a large geographic area, such as the European Union, that contains two or more geographic regions.

Location considerations

A good location balances latency, availability, and bandwidth costs.

  • Use a region to help optimize latency and network bandwidth.

  • Use a multi-region when you want to process data from outside of the Google network and distributed across large geographic areas, or when you want the higher availability that comes with being redundant across regions.

  • Generally, you should process your data in a location that is convenient or contains the majority of the users of your data.

  • If your organization is required to keep in-transit data within a specified location, then use only the regions or multi-regions that support regional endpoints. In this case, you need to use the Cloud Data Loss Prevention API, because the regional endpoints for Sensitive Data Protection aren't available for use with the Google Cloud console.

Specify a region

How you specify the processing region depends on the type of endpoint you are sending the request to—the global endpoint or a regional endpoint. The type of endpoint you choose depends on whether you're required to keep in-transit data within a specified region. For more information, see Global and regional endpoints for Sensitive Data Protection.

Specify a region in a request to the global endpoint

Console

Choose a region when setting up your Sensitive Data Protection operation.

For example, when creating a job trigger, choose a location from the Resource location menu, as shown here:

If the processing location is not a concern, use the Global region and Google chooses the location where processing should take place. Global is the default region choice.

REST

Insert region information into the request endpoint URL. If the processing location is not a concern, use the global region and Google chooses the location where processing should take place. Note that any resources created by a request that specifies the global region are stored under the global region.

The following are some example requests to the global endpoint.

Using the global region

The following two requests have the same effect. Not including a region is the same as specifying locations/global/.

POST https://www.googleapis.com/dlp/v2/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/global/content:inspect
 
POST https://www.googleapis.com/dlp/v2/projects/PROJECT_ID/content:inspect

Using a specific region

To specify a region for processing, within the resource URL, insert locations/ and then the region name.

POST https://www.googleapis.com/dlp/v2/projects/PROJECT_ID/locations/us-west2/content:inspect

Specify a region in a request to a regional endpoint

Console

For Sensitive Data Protection, regional endpoints aren't available for use with the Google Cloud console.

C#

To learn how to install and use the client library for Sensitive Data Protection, see Sensitive Data Protection client libraries.

To authenticate to Sensitive Data Protection, set up Application Default Credentials. For more information, see Set up authentication for a local development environment. 


using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using Google.Api.Gax.ResourceNames;
using Google.Cloud.Dlp.V2;
using static Google.Cloud.Dlp.V2.InspectConfig.Types;

public class InspectStringRep
{
    public static InspectContentResponse Inspect(
        string projectId,
        string repLocation,
        string dataValue,
        string minLikelihood,
        int maxFindings,
        bool includeQuote,
        IEnumerable<InfoType> infoTypes,
        IEnumerable<CustomInfoType> customInfoTypes)
    {
        var inspectConfig = new InspectConfig
        {
            MinLikelihood = (Likelihood)Enum.Parse(typeof(Likelihood), minLikelihood, true),
            Limits = new FindingLimits
            {
                MaxFindingsPerRequest = maxFindings
            },
            IncludeQuote = includeQuote,
            InfoTypes = { infoTypes },
            CustomInfoTypes = { customInfoTypes }
        };
        var request = new InspectContentRequest
        {
            Parent = new LocationName(projectId, repLocation).ToString(),
            Item = new ContentItem
            {
                Value = dataValue
            },
            InspectConfig = inspectConfig
        };

        var dlp = new DlpServiceClientBuilder
        {
            Endpoint = $"dlp.{repLocation}.rep.googleapis.com"
        }.Build();

        var response = dlp.InspectContent(request);

        PrintResponse(includeQuote, response);

        return response;
    }

    private static void PrintResponse(bool includeQuote, InspectContentResponse response)
    {
        var findings = response.Result.Findings;
        if (findings.Any())
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Findings:");
            foreach (var finding in findings)
            {
                if (includeQuote)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine($"  Quote: {finding.Quote}");
                }
                Console.WriteLine($"  InfoType: {finding.InfoType}");
                Console.WriteLine($"  Likelihood: {finding.Likelihood}");
            }
        }
        else
        {
            Console.WriteLine("No findings.");
        }
    }
}

Go

To learn how to install and use the client library for Sensitive Data Protection, see Sensitive Data Protection client libraries.

To authenticate to Sensitive Data Protection, set up Application Default Credentials. For more information, see Set up authentication for a local development environment. 

import (
	"context"
	"fmt"
	"io"

	dlp "cloud.google.com/go/dlp/apiv2"
	"cloud.google.com/go/dlp/apiv2/dlppb"
	"google.golang.org/api/option"
)

// inspectString inspects the a given string, and prints results.
func inspectStringRep(w io.Writer, projectID, repLocation, textToInspect string) error {
	// projectID := "my-project-id"
	// textToInspect := "My name is Gary and my email is gary@example.com"
	ctx := context.Background()

	// Assemble the regional endpoint url using provided rep location
	repEndpoint := fmt.Sprintf("dlp.%s.rep.googleapis.com:443", repLocation)

	// Initialize client.
	client, err := dlp.NewClient(ctx, option.WithEndpoint(repEndpoint))
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}
	defer client.Close() // Closing the client safely cleans up background resources.

	// Create and send the request.
	req := &dlppb.InspectContentRequest{
		Parent: fmt.Sprintf("projects/%s/locations/%s", projectID, repLocation),
		Item: &dlppb.ContentItem{
			DataItem: &dlppb.ContentItem_Value{
				Value: textToInspect,
			},
		},
		InspectConfig: &dlppb.InspectConfig{
			InfoTypes: []*dlppb.InfoType{
				{Name: "PHONE_NUMBER"},
				{Name: "EMAIL_ADDRESS"},
				{Name: "CREDIT_CARD_NUMBER"},
			},
			IncludeQuote: true,
		},
	}
	resp, err := client.InspectContent(ctx, req)
	if err != nil {
		return err
	}

	// Process the results.
	result := resp.Result
	fmt.Fprintf(w, "Findings: %d\n", len(result.Findings))
	for _, f := range result.Findings {
		fmt.Fprintf(w, "\tQuote: %s\n", f.Quote)
		fmt.Fprintf(w, "\tInfo type: %s\n", f.InfoType.Name)
		fmt.Fprintf(w, "\tLikelihood: %s\n", f.Likelihood)
	}
	return nil
}

Java

To learn how to install and use the client library for Sensitive Data Protection, see Sensitive Data Protection client libraries.

To authenticate to Sensitive Data Protection, set up Application Default Credentials. For more information, see Set up authentication for a local development environment. 


import com.google.cloud.dlp.v2.DlpServiceClient;
import com.google.cloud.dlp.v2.DlpServiceSettings;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.ByteContentItem;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.ByteContentItem.BytesType;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.ContentItem;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.Finding;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.InfoType;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.InspectConfig;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.InspectContentRequest;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.InspectContentResponse;
import com.google.privacy.dlp.v2.LocationName;
import com.google.protobuf.ByteString;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;

public class InspectStringRep {

  public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    // TODO(developer): Replace these variables before running the sample.
    String projectId = "your-project-id";
    String repLocation = "regional-endpoint-location-to-use";
    String textToInspect = "My name is Gary and my email is gary@example.com";
    inspectString(projectId, repLocation, textToInspect);