Policy Management Server Automating Enterprise Policy Association
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Solution Overview
Problem
Existing systems lack automation for associating published policies with multiple instances of system policies and managing exceptions, making it difficult to determine and maintain consistency across a distributed enterprise.
Innovation Solution
A policy management solution that stores information about published policies, policy exceptions, and system policies, using rules to identify inconsistencies and notify authorities of potential changes, allowing for automated association and alerting of mismatches.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If automated association and monitoring systems are implemented, then policy consistency and management efficiency are improved, but system complexity and implementation cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary system consisting of a policy management server and database that acts as a mediator between published policies and systems policies. This intermediary automatically associates policies, monitors changes, and generates alerts, thereby improving management efficiency while containing complexity within the intermediary layer rather than propagating it throughout the entire enterprise system.
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback mechanisms by continuously monitoring policy associations and generating alerts when inconsistencies or changes are detected. The feedback loop includes automatic association monitoring, change detection, and notification to administrators, which improves policy consistency without requiring manual intervention at every stage.
2Reliability
If manual tracking of policy associations is performed, then system complexity remains low, but policy consistency and detection of mismatches deteriorate
Solution Approach 1:
The system enables self-service functionality where the policy management infrastructure automatically performs association tracking, consistency verification, and alert generation without requiring manual intervention. The automated system serves itself by monitoring its own state and notifying administrators of issues, thereby improving reliability while reducing the need for ongoing manual management overhead.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-establishing associations between published policies and systems policies in a centralized database before inconsistencies occur. This proactive approach allows the system to detect and alert on potential issues before they affect policy enforcement, improving reliability without requiring complex real-time intervention mechanisms.
3Measurement precision
If comprehensive policy monitoring is implemented across all domains, then detection precision of inconsistencies is improved, but information overload and alert management difficulty increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system extracts and isolates only the critical inconsistency information from the vast amount of policy data across multiple domains. By focusing on detecting and reporting only actual mismatches and changes rather than presenting all policy details, the system achieves high detection precision while preventing information overload through selective extraction of relevant alerts.
Solution Approach 2:
The monitoring system applies local quality by tailoring the level of monitoring and alerting to specific domains and policy types. Rather than uniform monitoring across all policies, the system can adjust monitoring intensity and alert detail based on the criticality and characteristics of individual policies, improving detection precision for critical policies while reducing information overload for less critical ones.
Data Source
AI summary
A distributed enterprise includes a policy management module and policy library for automating policy change alerting. The policy management module and policy library are configured to list associations between published policies, published policy exceptions, and one or more systems policies, and to determine if changes to published (written) enterprise policies, published policy exceptions, or systems policies have occurred. The policy management module and policy library are also configured to notify personnel of the distributed enterprise so that appropriate actions may be implemented.