Use the Policy Manager to create policies that answer the question, "Should this resource-access request be permitted or denied"? In a traditional role-based access control (RBAC) system, this question might instead be, "Who is the user making the access request, and have they been assigned a role that is permitted access to the resource?" Although you can model such a policy, the PingAuthorize Policy Editor functions essentially as an attribute-based access-control (ABAC) system. In such a system, the question can be rephrased as, "Given the facts that I know about the user, the resource being accessed, what the user wants to do with the resource, how sure I am the user is who they say they are, and any other pertinent facts about the world at this point in time, should the user's access request be permitted, and must anything else be done in addition to permitting or denying access?"

The length of that question speaks to the inherent power of the Policy Editor. Fortunately, the Policy Manager makes harnessing this power straightforward.