About Policies

The Policy Manager Workbench Policies View is the starting point for defining, configuring, and managing policies used to govern web services that are managed in Policy Manager Workbench. Polices are supported at both the Root and Sub-Organization levels.

For information about using policies in the context of the Community Manager developer portal, see Business Policies.

Table of Contents

Overview

Policies are defined in the Policies Object within an Organization and can also be added at the Organization level by selecting Add Policy from the Actions portlet. The Policies Object provides a platform for managing the creation and maintenance of WS-Security policies that comprise your Policy Manager deployment. In addition, a policy cannot be moved from one Organization to another.

The policy framework supports delegated administration which means that policies can be assigned at the Organization and Service Operation levels. Based on your security requirements, you can configure policies as single entities or you can define a policy group (for example, Aggregate Policy) that includes two or more policies. The Add Policy Wizard is used to create a policy. Policies can be attached to different governable entities in the Policy Manager Workbench including Organizations, Services, Endpoints, Operations, and Messages.

You can create a new version of a policy. However, only one version of a policy can be active at one time. The new version is in a Draft state until it's activated; once it's activated, it replaces the previous version in all instances where the policy is in use.

The following list represents all of the supported policy functions. The Policies Summary screen includes a set of general policy actions that are common for all policies. The Modify Policy functions provide configuration options that are unique to each policy type.

For information about using policies in the context of the Community Manager developer portal, see Business Policies.

Policy Functions

You can do the following with policies. For more information, see Managing Policies.

Policy Categories

There are three policy categories:

QoS Policies

Quality of Service policies allow you to define metrics of requirements for ensuring service availability, performance, integrity, and reliability.

The platform supports the following Quality of Service policies:

For more information, see About QoS Policies.

Operational Policies

The platform supports the following operational policies:

The following information on additional operational policies is applicable only if you have the Envision product installed:

For more information, see About Operational Policies.

Compliance Policies

The platform supports the following compliance policies:

For more information, see About Compliance Policies.