A policy is a set of optimization, security, location awareness, storage, and other configuration settings that determine the optimization rules for the SteelHead Mobile clients. SteelHead Mobile clients must have a policy and other endpoint-specific settings for optimization. Packages deployed to the SteelHead Mobile clients must contain a policy.

The Mobile Controller ships with a default policy, Initial, that is suitable for standard in-path deployments. You can install and deploy the Mobile Controller without modifying this default policy. For details on default-policy Initial settings, see Default Policy Settings

You can create policies as configuration templates to configure groups of SteelHead Mobile clients that have the same performance requirements. For example, you might use the default policy for the majority of your SteelHead Mobile clients and create another policy for a group of SteelHead Mobile clients that need to pass through a specific type of traffic. When you modify a policy, the SteelHead Mobile client is updated automatically by the Mobile Controller when the policy is saved and the SteelHead Mobile is connected, or when the SteelHead Mobile next connects.

If you install the SteelHead Mobile software so that your users have access to the Mobile Controller, your users are able to modify some administrator-defined policy settings. If a new policy is sent to the Mobile Controller whose settings have been overridden by the user, the user’s settings remain in effect until the user clicks Reset under Settings > Reset to Administrator Policy in the client, or until the user returns the modified client setting to Auto (if applicable).

To deploy the SteelHead Mobile software with the default settings, you simply make the default package available to your SteelHead Mobile clients. For details about packages, see Basic Steps for Deploying the SteelHead Mobile Package.

Policies affect the optimization experience for SteelHead Mobile clients. Policies include settings for the following optimization features.

For details about default policy settings, see Default Policy Settings

For details about features in policies, see the SteelHead Management Console User’s Guide.