About policies

A policy is a set of Kaspersky application settings that are applied to an administration group and its subgroups. You can install several Kaspersky applications on the devices of an administration group. Kaspersky Security Center Cloud Console provides a single policy for each Kaspersky application in an administration group. A policy has one of the following statuses (see the table below):

The status of the policy

Policies function according to the following rules:

• Multiple policies with different values can be configured for a single application.
• Only one policy can be active for the current application.
• You can activate an inactive policy when a specific event occurs. For example, you can enforce stricter anti-virus protection settings during virus outbreaks.
• A policy can have child policies.

Generally, you can use policies as preparations for emergency situations, such as a virus attack. For example, if there is an attack via flash drives, you can activate a policy that blocks access to flash drives. In this case, the current active policy automatically becomes inactive.

In order to prevent maintaining multiple policies, for example, when different occasions assume changing of several settings only, you may use policy profiles.

A policy profile is a named subset of policy settings values that replaces the settings values of a policy. A policy profile affects the effective settings formation on a managed device. Effective settings are a set of policy settings, policy profile settings, and local application settings that are currently applied for the device.

Policy profiles function according to the following rules:

• A policy profile takes an effect when a specific activation condition occurs.
• Policy profiles contain values of settings that differ from the policy settings.
• Activation of a policy profile changes the effective settings of the managed device.
• A policy can include a maximum of 100 policy profiles.

You cannot create an Administration Server policy.