Singlepolicy

Singlepolicy is a term used in policy management to describe a unified approach to defining and enforcing rules across multiple domains within an organization. It denotes a single policy artifact or model that consolidates identity, resource, action, and context rules, and that can be evaluated by a policy decision point to authorize or deny requests.

In a singlepolicy framework, policy authors create one comprehensive policy or a tightly integrated set of rules that apply across services, data domains, and environments. The framework relies on standardized representations, such as a common vocabulary for subjects, objects, actions, conditions, and obligations, and on policy enforcement points that consult the central policy during decision making. The goal is to achieve consistency, reduce duplication, and simplify governance, while preserving enough expressiveness to capture domain-specific constraints.

Benefits include improved consistency across systems, easier auditing and compliance reporting, simplified policy management, and more straightforward automation and changes. Challenges include achieving adequate expressiveness without becoming overly complex, ensuring performance at scale, avoiding policy conflicts, and facilitating migration from existing multi-policy environments. Governance and access control for the single policy repository itself become critical, as does maintaining clear ownership and version history.

Singlepolicy concepts have applications in enterprise IT, cloud governance, data protection and privacy regimes, and regulatory compliance programs. They are used to enforce access control, data retention, sharing policies, and consents under a unified framework, while enabling policy versioning and traceability.