About policies and policy profiles

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 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

Status	Description
Active	The current policy that is applied to the device. Only one policy may be active for a Kaspersky application in each administration group. Devices apply the settings values of an active policy for a Kaspersky application.
Inactive	A policy that is not currently applied to a device.
Out-of-office	If this option is selected, the policy becomes active when the device leaves the corporate network.

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.