Overview

A policy defines rules that specify access privileges to an organization’s protected resources. Businesses posses resources, applications and services that they need to protect, manage and monitor. Policies control the access permissions and usage of these resources by defining when and how a user can perform an action on a given resource. A policy defines the resources for a particular principal.

A principal can be an individual, a corporation, a role, or a group; anything that can have an identity. for more information, see the Java™ 2 Platform Standard Edition Javadoc.

A single policy can define either binary or non-binary decisions. A binary decision is yes/no, true/ false or allow/deny. A non-binary decision represents the value of an attribute. For example, a mail service might include a mailboxQuota attribute with a maximum storage value set for each user. In general, a policy is configured to define what a principal can do to which resource and under what conditions.