Policy Guide › How Policy Works › Policy Processing › Optimized Policy Processing

Optimized Policy Processing

CA Data Protection is designed to minimize the level of policy processing needed to accurately analyze an event.

Policy processing is optimized to ensure that triggers are accurately applied as quickly as possible. In particular, these optimizations ensure that no unnecessary processing is performed, and that processing terminates correctly at the earliest opportunity. For example, CA Data Protection supports the following optimizations:

• A Block action terminates policy processing. No further control actions get applied after an event is blocked. The same is true for Warning events where the user heeds warning. That is, if a user heeds a warning and does not continue, no further control actions are applied.
• CA Data Protection supports a No Further Action intervention option. This is primarily used to handle spam emails. This option instructs CA Data Protection to immediately stop processing an event and ensures that any subsequent actions which would normally be performed (such as forwarding the email or sending a reply) are not performed.
• CA Data Protection uses a data-on-demand approach when transferring policy settings across the network. If a policy engine requires policy data from the CMS while processing an event (that is, it does not have a cached copy of the required user policy), the CMS only sends the minimum data necessary to complete each processing step.

  For example, if a policy engine needs a user's email policy to be sent down from the CMS, the CMS at first only sends those trigger settings that analyze the email's metadata. If these settings are sufficient by themselves to fire the trigger (for example, because the email is addressed to a proscribed recipient), then no further policy settings get sent across the network.