Concepts, activities and issues of policy-based communications management

Policy-based management is art approach that has been considered for some years within the distributed systems management research community. The concepts have recently been adopted by standards bodies including the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Desktop Management Taskforce (DMTF) and Object Management Group (OMG) and are starting to appear in marketing literature for Internet protocol (IP) network management products. The meaning of the term is not well-defined nor consistently used, but common aspects of policy include that it changes a system's behaviour, that it is defined after system deployment, and that it does not require a full software development life cycle. Technical problems remain which need to be solved before the full ambitions of policy-based management can be achieved. Initial products ar-e likely to address only a sub-set of the full potential and to exist in niche domains.