Patent ID: 7805449

Claim:
A method for enterprise policy management, comprising: harvesting metadata about managed objects across network file systems residing in a computing environment, wherein the network file systems operate under various file system protocols at one or more physical locations, wherein the managed objects comprise files and directories, and wherein the harvesting comprises: interacting with a file system abstraction layer/protocol adaptor to access the managed files and directories across the network file systems; collecting raw metadata of the managed files and directories; filtering the raw metadata in real time; placing the filtered raw metadata in one or more volume metadata caches; synthesizing synthetic metadata from the filtered raw metadata; generating content-based metadata, wherein generating content-based metadata for a managed file comprises processing content of the file according to a type of the file to determine one or more content-specific entities within the file; transforming the filtered raw metadata, the synthetic metadata, and the content-based metadata into metadata records having a common representation, wherein each of the metadata record comprises a set of attributes associated with a file or directory residing on the file systems; processing the metadata records; and placing processed metadata records in a metadata repository, each record linking a set of attributes to one of the managed objects in the network file systems; configuring a management device with at least one filtering mechanism, wherein the management device is coupled to the network file systems and the metadata repository; enabling a user to define a policy rule via a user interface to the management device, wherein the policy rule comprises a condition and a corresponding action and the condition is associated with the raw metadata, the synthetic metadata or the content-based metadata; selecting from the metadata repository one or more metadata records having one or more attributes that satisfy the condition defined in the policy rule; and applying the action defined in the policy rule to one or more of the managed objects in the network file systems that are associated with the one or more metadata records, thereby changing a state of the network file systems in accordance with the policy rule.