Policy based storage management is an administrative approach that is used to simplify the management of a given endeavor by establishing policies to deal with situations that are likely to occur. Policies are operating rules that can be referred to as a means of maintaining order, security, consistency, or other ways of successfully furthering a business goal or mission.

Since Policy based storage management provides a more manageable interface and decision pattern, administrators could set policies to handle such matters as basic configurations, change issues, and error management. This improves return on investment (ROI) because policies are automatically handled, which administrators would otherwise have to direct the framework to do at great length.

There are a number of software packages available to automate some elements of policy based storage management. In general, the way these work is as follows: business policies are input to the products, and the software communicates to network hardware how to support those policies.

There are challenges connected with policy based storage management, including customization and processing load. Customizing policy can be complicated both from the business side and from the technical side. Processing power is an issue as well. Many policies work via intelligent agents, but many storage hosts are already overloaded. To relieve the processing load, some storage management vendors off-load agent activity from the operating system onto dedicated devices such as interconnects, but this adds an unwelcome level of complexity to such devices.