Patent ID: 6941465

Claim:
A method for enforcing a selected policy from a set of polices maintained by a policy server to be applied to a user interconnected to a network through a communication path, wherein the network includes a gateway and one or more resources, comprising: receiving, by the gateway, a request from the user to access the one or more resources on the network; selecting a user object from a plurality of stored objects, wherein the user object corresponds to the user and includes a set of attributes comprising a group to which the user belongs, a user name, password, and an override attribute; determining whether to grant or deny access to the network based upon the user name and password; identifying a profile that applies to the user based on the set of attributes, including the group to which the user belongs, wherein the profile includes an authorization parameter and a communication parameter; determining, by the gateway, whether to grant or deny access to the resources on the network based upon the authorization parameter; and configuring the communication path, including setting quality of service (QOS) based upon the communication parameter.