TOWARDS AUTOMATING POLICY- BASED MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

The goal of distributed systems management is to provide reliable, secure and efficient utilization of the network, processors and devices that comprise those systems. The management system makes use of management agents to collect events and data from managed objects while policies provide information on how to modify the behaviour of a managed system. Systems as well as policies governing the behaviour of the system and its constituents can change dynamically. The aim of this work is to provide the services and algorithms needed to automatically identify and deploy management entities and be able to respond automatically to both changes to the system itself as well as to changes in the way the system is to be managed, i.e., changes to the set of management policies or sets of management agents. One significant challenge in the use of policy-based management systems is finding efficient mechanisms to address and simplify the gap between expressing and specifying policies and an actual configuration of a management system that realizes and makes use of policies. Little work has been done to define how the monitoring operations are to be configured and updated according to the policies. This Thesis proposes a general architecture for a policy-based management system for distributed systems which allows for expressing and automating the deployment of a wide range of management policies. The proposed solution is based on the matching between the management operations that are carried out by the management agents and the policies. The matching process relies on the attributes that the agents can monitor and the extracted attributes from the components of the policies. One major contribution of this Thesis is to build the policy model and services on existing management services found in commercial management systems. The work of this Thesis also focuses in finding87 strategies for selecting and configuring agents to be used to keep the time of a policy deployment low. The Thesis introduces the Policy-Management Agent Integrated Console (PMagic) prototype. The PMagic prototype has been implemented to provide a practical validation of the policy based management system model proposed. The approach, architecture and prototype have demonstrated that it is possible to create a more autonomic management system, particularly one that can instantiate agents to react to changes in sets of policies

Understanding responsible innovation in small producers’ clusters in Northern Vietnam:A grounded theory approach to globalization and poverty alleviation

Abstract: The PhD thesis explores new economic dynamics within poor small producers’ clusters in craft villages in northern Vietnam; a country in full economic swing after market economy reforms and opening up to the world. The central research question of the thesis - positioned in current debates about poverty alleviation, small business, globalization and sustainable development - reads: How to understand responsible innovation within poor small producers’ clusters in Vietnam following the country’s integration into the global economy? The question is addressed in four subsequent published articles that draw on empirical studies involving grounded theory. The first article advances an operational definition of innovation for informally organized small producers’ clusters in Vietnam, enabling the identification of a number of cases of cluster-level innovation. The second article discusses the responsible innovation concept in the context of developing economies, arguing that it should be combined with current notions of poverty alleviation and sustainable development. The article concludes that it is problematic to evaluate responsible innovation on the basis of outcomes. This conclusion lays the basis for the third article which articulates an alternative approach that models responsible innovation as a societal process in which innovators acknowledge responsibility in resolving societal conflict as a result of harmful outcomes. The fourth article explores the dynamics of this societal process through Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in which all human actors and materiality are allowed and enrolled into a network. The PhD thesis concludes with ideas for further theory development and the policy implications of the findings of this thesis.

Dynamic Policy Model for Large Evolving Enterprises

The nature of an open distributed environment provides a resoundingly diverse yet potentially chaotic environment for users. A great deal of research has focused on the management of resources in such an environment and policy-based management has emerged as one such promising solution. In order to support large evolving enterprises, we are currently developing a policy model that will be scalable and able to cope with the extraordinarily high rate of change inherent in such environments. To do this, we have developed a number of novel concepts including: enterprise domain, policy space and policy authority which are unique and central to our approach. The overall objective of producing this model is to support dynamic roles, dynamic policies and the subsequent dynamic, conflict analysis. Prevailing policy-based management models largely promote the static definition and analysis of policy. We argue that although these models are suitable for homogenous, largely static environments, they are too rigid to adequately represent large, heterogeneous, evolving enterprise as the fluidity and complexity of interactions occurring in such environments are genuinely difficult and often impossible to pre-empt at the time of policy specification and role assignmen

Dynamic Policy Model for Large Evolving Enterprises

The nature of an open distributed environment provides a resoundingly diverse yet potentially chaotic environment for users. A great deal of research has focused on the management of resources in such an environment and policy-based management has emerged as one such promising solution