6.1.5 Managing a Rule List

You configure rules to create a policy. The rules collectively represent a desired course of action when the required conditions are met, such as denying entry-level employees access to a secure website, and permitting access for employees who have a role of Manager.

When the system evaluates the policy conditions, it begins with the rule with the highest priority and evaluates the conditions, starting with the first condition group in the rule. Each rule contains one or more conditions and one or more actions. If a rule’s conditions are met, the rule’s action is performed. For some policy types, the performance of any rule’s action terminates the policy evaluation. With Authorization policies, for example, after the policy has determined that a user is either permitted or denied access to a resource, there is no reason to evaluate the policy further. However, a Role policy might identify multiple roles to which a user belongs. In this case, each rule of the policy must be evaluated to determine all roles to which the user belongs.

IMPORTANT:The interface for the policy engine is designed for flexibility. It does not protect you from creating rules that do nothing because they are always true or always false. For example, you can set up a condition where Client IP is equal to Client IP, which is always true. You are responsible for defining the condition so that it does a meaningful comparison.

To manage the list of rules for a policy:

  1. Click Policies > Policies.

  2. Select the container.

  3. Click the name of the policy.

  4. In the Rule List section, select one of the following:

    New: To create a new rule, click New.

    You use multiple rules to coordinate how a policy operates, and the behavior varies according to the policy type. To understand how multiple rules are evaluated, see the following:

    Delete: Select a rule, then click this option to delete the rule. If the policy has only one rule, you cannot delete the last rule.

    Copy: Select a rule, then click this option to copy a rule. To modify the copy, click the rule number.

    Enable: Select a rule, then click this option to enable a rule.

    Disable: Select a rule, then click this option to disable a rule.

  5. Click OK > Apply Changes.