Policy Management Requirements

The use of policy in system management is increasingly being recognised as a very important part of a more advanced approach to making IT administration less daunting. However, despite the many excellent papers that have emerged in the last few years proposing ways of doing management with policy, the requirements of this approach have not been well documented. This paper attempts to spell out what the ideal policy-based management packages for IT system should provide to an organisation, and how this will enable the IT manager to cope with the various aspects in the availability, performance and security issues in system and service support.