Patent ID: 7318237

Claim:
A system for controlling access to a software application in accordance with enterprise and local security policies, comprising: a server that includes a policy manager to manage an enterprise set of security policies, and to distribute to each of a plurality of clients a subset of said enterprise set of security policies; and a plurality of clients, each client including an application guard, wherein the client receives the subset of security policies from the server and stores them locally on the client, and wherein the application guard then uses the local security policies to manage access by a user of the client to a software application; wherein said policy manager further includes: an optimizer component that determines, for each application guard, which subset of the enterprise set of security policies said each application guard should receive; and a differ component that computes a difference between the subset and any previous local security policy of said each application guard, such that the policy manager distributes only changed portions of the local security policy, which are applicable to said each application guard as determined by the optimizer element.