A policy is specified for an administration group. Policy settings can be inherited, that is, received in the subgroups (child groups) of the administration group for which they were set. Hereinafter, a policy for a parent group is also referred to as a parent policy.
You can enable or disable two options of inheritance: Inherit settings from parent policy and Force inheritance of settings in child policies:
If you enable Inherit settings from parent policy for a child policy and lock some settings in the parent policy, then you cannot change these settings for the child group. You can, however, change the settings that are not locked in the parent policy.
If you disable Inherit settings from parent policy for a child policy, then you can change all the settings in the child group, even if some settings are locked in the parent policy.
If you enable Force inheritance of settings in child policies in the parent group, this enables the Inherit settings from parent policy for each child policy. In this case, you cannot disable this option for any child policy. All the settings that are locked in the parent policy are forcibly inherited in the child groups, and you cannot change these settings in the child groups.
In policies for the Managed devices group, the Inherit settings from parent policy does not affect any settings, because the Managed devices group does not have any upstream groups and therefore does not inherit any policies.
By default, the Inherit settings from parent policy option is enabled for a new policy.
If a policy has profiles, all the child policies inherit these profiles.