Understanding security policies

A security policy consists of audit and protection rule sets. Each rule set is a set of security rules that applies to applications, ACL resources, network resources, devices and threat protection, which can be made private, i.e., specific to a policy, or shared among several policies.

Rule sets make it possible to pool rules for several policies, and manage various versions of these rule sets to create pre-production and production policies. Aggregating these rule sets in a single policy also makes it possible to load common rules over rules that are specific to your company’s environment.

EXAMPLE
You can alternate two policies based on a collaborator’s location – one policy to manage access to internal resources, and one policy to manage access to resources when the collaborator logs in remotely. Both of these policies can share the same sets of rules, with only one differing set, so that they can block mobile devices from connecting to the network when they are not connected to their domain network. The different rule set allows these devices to log in to their domain via only VPN tunnels.

Once security policies are created, they will be linked to agent groups that will apply them to your pool. Only security policies can be linked to agent groups. Rule sets cannot be directly linked to agents.

You can test your policies before implementing them. For more information, refer to the section Testing security policies.

Security rules can be disabled at any time. For more information, refer to the section Disabling security rules.