Integrated policy-based governance of virtual enterprises and systems

Abstract

System management is a required task for all modern enterprises and organisations. This task must be performed in an efficient and integrated manner. Enterprise computing systems are usually organised into domains for the purpose of enforcing management policies. In this paper, we cope with policy-based governance of virtual enterprises and systems. After providing all the related concepts and definitions for policy-based management, we present a general algorithm for constructing system policy hierarchies. Next, we go inside a policy hierarchy coping with analysis issues such as policy satisfaction, policy refinement and policy conflicts. Then, we depict the functional architecture for a policy hierarchy analysis service, discussing in parallel several architectural and implementation issues of policy-based management. Finally, we provide a set of examples that demonstrate the applicability of the approach.