Patent ID: 8353005

Claim:
In a computing environment, a method of defining a unified management policy expression for expressing an access control policy controlling operations on resources and execution of events or workflows, the method comprising: storing access control information that defines permissions for access to resources based on one or more entities and one or more operations requested by the one or more entities; storing events or workflows that are executed in response to the one or more operations being allowed on resources by one or more entities and one or more operations requested by the one or more entities, wherein storing events or workflows comprises storing the events or workflows in a same definition as the access control information in unified management policy rules; receiving a request to execute the one or more operations on one or more objects; calculating one or more of the unified management policy rules that apply for a given request and verifying the access control information against the request, wherein verifying comprises performing a single retrieval, retrieving both the access control information and the events or workflows, and wherein the unified management policy rules includes one or more rules that are reflexive such that calculating the one or more of the applicable unified management policy rules comprises determining that a particular requestor is defined in a rule based on a dynamic definition of the requestor based on a relationship of the requestor and a target resource object of the one or more objects; and executing the workflows defined in the definition.