Policy Management of Enterprise Systems: A Requirements Study

Policy enabled applications are being increasingly employed to support responsive Information Technology services. In competitive business environments, such services increase adaptability of both software and the processes they implement through externalized business and security logic. Over the last decade this has driven both industry and academia to contribute to policy research and engineering by developing specification languages, frameworks and toolkits. Since this work has typically been applied to and evaluated using new enterprise solutions, policy management for existing applications has been less well studied. In this paper we share our experiences on policy enabling an existing web based solution, together with identifying new policy enabling requirements from a specific class of enterprise systems. We first detail policy enablement requirements and constraints from the perspective of management and users of the application. We then present completed and ongoing work, our observations, and future directions.