Abstract
Policy-based management has been an area of intense interest for the last decade. The community is very active with an annual workshop and various standards efforts. While the ideal of policy-based management is a declarative approach in which the system takes actions to achieve policy-specified goals under policy-specified constraints, what is implemented in practice is much more limited. This panel will address the following issues: (1) To what extent is a declarative approach to policy possible? (2) What other kinds of policies should be considered? (3) What kind of policy standards are meaningful, especially contrasting syntactic and semantic approaches? (4) How can policies be acquired and maintained in practice? (5) How are the GRID, pervasive wireless computing and other technologies are shaping the field? (6) Are there alternatives to policy-based management?