PolicyBasedThat

PolicyBasedThat is a term used in some policy engineering and governance discussions to denote a framework for policy-driven decision making in software systems. The central premise is to encode organizational rules as machine-readable policies and to separate policy specification from application logic, allowing automated enforcement, auditability, and easier policy updates. The term is not standardized and its exact definition may vary across communities.

PolicyBasedThat typically relies on a layered architecture that includes a policy language for authoring rules, a policy engine that evaluates rules in context, and enforcement and data sources that provide inputs. A policy decision point receives requests, assesses applicable policies, and returns decisions such as permit, deny, or more nuanced actions. Context information, such as user identity, resource attributes, time, and risk scores, can influence the outcome through policy sets, hierarchies, and conflicts resolution.

Applications span access control, data privacy and compliance, workflow automation, cloud governance, and IoT device management. Benefits cited include greater consistency, traceability, faster policy updates, and better alignment with regulatory requirements. Common challenges involve managing policy complexity, potential performance overhead, conflicts among rules, versioning, and ensuring semantic clarity across teams.

PolicyBasedThat sits alongside related concepts like policy-based access control and policy languages (for example, XACML-like approaches) and is often discussed in the context of governance and compliance tooling.