Deployment Guide › Policy Engines › Policy Engine Architecture

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Policy Engine Architecture

Emails are allocated to individual policy engines by the policy engine hub. The hub and policy engines are designed to handle each email with minimal delay. In particular, the hub distributes processing across multiple policy machines in a manner that achieves optimum load-balancing and maximizes throughput. It can also handle hardware failures on remote policy engine machines seamlessly, redistributing events to other policy engines if necessary.

PE architecture

Policy engines and email server integration

This example shows how policy engines can be used to integrate CA DLP with an email server.

  1. Email server. CA DLP can integrate with Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino (1a). This server also hosts the CA DLP Exchange server agent or Domino server agent (1b) and policy engine hub (1c).

    The policy engine hub creates connections between the email server agent and each policy engine host machine and also maintains performance and event processing statistics for each host machine.

  2. Email interception. Emails transiting through the server, whether sent from internal machines (2a) or external machines (2b), are detected by the email server agent and passed to the policy engine hub.
  3. Policy engines. When the policy engine hub receives a new e‑mail from the e‑mail server agent, it allocates the email to the least heavily loaded policy engine (that is, the policy engine that can process the new email most quickly). The policy engine then analyzes the e‑mail and applies policy triggers as necessary.
  4. CMS. Each policy engine replicates processed emails up to the CMS.