next up previous contents
Next: 5.8 Summary Up: 5. Policy Management with Previous: 5.6 Properties of Metapolicies   Contents

5.7 Benefits of Metapolicies

The most evident benefit of metapolicies is, that they fulfil the demand of policy management. The way they accomplish this is as flexible and sophisticated as policies are.

Reusing the same technique entails consequently reusing the same environment and infrastructure. An appropriate environment for policies must be in place in any case and reusing it for metapolicies causes only minimal extra effort and costs. And, expertise gained in the area of policies is easy to transfer metapolicies. No other management mechanism can integrate so well into a policy-base management system.

As mentioned above, metapolicies require the greatest expressiveness, but the area of their application is small in comparison to normal policies. In many cases, this results in straight forward refinement and integration procedures. However, this does not mean that handling metapolicies is easier in any case. Especially metapolicies of the conflict area require in depth understanding of the entire policy mechanism implemented by a system. Results on research of conflicting policies are still very limited [MoSl 93a,LuSl 97a].

It is another advantage, that metapolicies remain, once developed, to be quite stable in certain areas. This is a result of the properties of policies in general, because they are seen as statements of best practice [Wood 97]. It is true especially in those areas dealing with organisational aspects and the management system itself, because these areas stay more stable than the rest of the fast changing IT environment.


next up previous contents
Next: 5.8 Summary Up: 5. Policy Management with Previous: 5.6 Properties of Metapolicies   Contents
Copyright Munich Network Management Team