From processes to policies - concepts for large scale policy generation

Process-oriented IT management has gained more and more significance due to the need to specify and control IT infrastructures and services. An indicator for this circumstance is the success of the IT infrastructure library and the enhanced Telecom Operations Map. A process-oriented view allows administrators to specify management tasks and to decompose complex tasks into process chains and hierarchies. Policy based management is a promising candidate for implementation of processes, as it delivers a powerful concept for the implementation of management tasks. Policies are well suited for large scale systems, as the distributed execution in heterogeneous environments is one of the important features of policy architectures. We introduce patterns for the automated generation of policies from process specifications. To achieve the translation between process and policy specification, we leverage common characteristics of processes and policies and define mappings that serve as generic translation patterns. The use of these patterns allows automated translation of process definitions to policies. The approach enables high-level, intuitive management specification, while taking a step towards augmented automation and integration at the operational level. We derive requirements imposed by the translation, and present ProPolis, a policy language incorporating those requirements.