Patent ID: 8495227

Claim:
A method to distribute policies, comprising: determining if a policy template is present at an enforcement point in response to receiving an identification (ID) assigned to the policy template at the enforcement point, wherein the policy template includes a form of “if a first parameter then a second parameter”, the policy template and the parameters being transmitted separately to reduce use of communication resources by factoring the template and parameters to be used in the template and to permit different parameters to be transmitted from time to time to replace previous parameters in the policy template without the need of transmitting the entire policy template again to further reduce use of communication resources; transmitting a query from the enforcement point to a repository, where policy templates are stored, in response to the policy template not being present at the enforcement point, wherein the query includes the ID assigned to the policy template; receiving the policy template at the enforcement point, wherein the policy template is transmitted by the repository in response to the query; and receiving a set of parameters to be used in the policy template at the enforcement point, wherein the set of parameters are transmitted separately from the policy template.