Examining the Needs of a Policy Solution
Published on 14 Jul 2014 · Filed in Information · 292 words (estimated 2 minutes to read)In April of this year, we started a series of articles at Network Heresy on the topic of policy in the data center. The first of these articles, which I mentioned in this post, focused on the problem of policy in the data center. This was a great introduction to the need for policy and the challenges with the current ways of addressing policy in the data center.
A short while ago, we published the second of our series on policy, titled “On Policy in the Data Center: The solution space”. This post describes the key features/functionality that a policy system must have to address the challenges identified in part 1 of the series. In a nutshell (I highly recommend you go read the full article), these key areas include:
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The sources from which policy is derived
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The language(s) used to express policy
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The way policy systems interact with data center services
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The actions a policy system can take
I really liked this statement from the article (this is in reference to how a policy system interacts with other services in the data center):
A policy system by itself is useless; to have value, the policy system must interact and integrate with other data center or cloud services.
The relationship between a policy system and the ecosystem of data center services with which it interacts is so critical. Having a policy system is great, but if the policy system can’t be integrated with other data center or cloud services, then it’s not very useful, is it?
Go have a look at the second post in the series on policy in the data center and feel free to join in the conversation. You can leave comments here or at the Network Heresy site.