Chapter 26 – Policy-Driven System Management

Policy-driven system management or policy-based management (PBM) is a research domain that aims to automate the management of large-scale computing systems. The long-term vision of PBM is that humans no longer need to care for low-level aspects of system management, but may focus on the specification of high-level management goals that will be autonomously enforced by computer agents. Ultimately, computing systems will be comparable to, for instance, biological systems that regulate basic body functions such as the heart rate without conscious intervention by humans. The promise of PBM lies, on the one hand, in reducing system management costs that grew significantly over the past decades and, on the other hand, in the improvement in service quality. Although PBM has several application domains, this chapter focuses particularly on its use for securing computing systems according to high-level security goals.