Patent ID: 8266118

Claim:
A computer program product comprising one or more computer-readable storage devices having thereon computer-executable instructions that, when executed by one or more processors of a computing system, causes the computing system to perform a method for automated access policy translation, the method comprising: an act of accessing a first resource access policy comprised of an access control list (ACL) having a plurality of access control elements, each element having one or more data fields that define an access permission associated with a resource, and a principal to which the associated permission is to be applied; an act of accessing a second resource policy comprised of a hierarchically structured data structure; an act of identifying one or more data fields of the first resource access policy that are to be used to populate at least a portion of the hierarchical data structure of the second resource access policy; for each of the one or more identified data fields of the first resource access policy, an act of identifying an appropriate corresponding one or more positions within the hierarchical data structure of the second resource access policy which are to be populated by the identified one or more data fields from the ACL of the first resource access policy; and for each of the one or more identified data fields in the ACL of the first resource access policy, an act of copying the identified one or more data fields into the corresponding one or more positions within the hierarchical data structure of the second resource access policy in order to automatically populate the corresponding one or more positions within the hierarchical data structure of the second resource access policy.