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How Policies Work in Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection

Article: 100050089
Last Published: 2025-08-22
Ratings: 0 1
Product(s): Alta SaaS Protection

Description

Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection (CASP) executes policies on a near-real time basis. You never have to worry about scheduling your policies. Simply create them, and within a few minutes of applying any changes your policies will automatically run.
 
This article will discuss some of the general features of CASP policies, and will walk you through an example of how to configure a policy.

 

Types of Policies in Alta SaaS Protection

The types of policies are:
  • Retention
  • Tagging
  • Indexing
  • Statistical

Each policy automatically maintains statistics about the content matching the policy's selection criteria.

In CASP, legal holds, searches added to a case, RegExs, and other types of jobs all leverage the policy evaluation and action executor frameworks.

 

Policies Operate at the Stor Level

The boundary of each policy is the Stor. You'll notice when creating Indexing policies that it is done within the context of a Stor's configuration, and when you create Retention and Tagging policies that there is a drop down menu to select which Stor they will apply to.

 

Policy Execution Interval

You can control how often policies run on each Stor. To see or modify this setting, browse to ' Administration ->  Storage', then select the Stor.
 


 
Under the ' General' tab of each Stor, you will see a ' Policy evaluation' section at the bottom with a setting to control the number of minutes CASP must wait before re-executing policies (default is 15 minutes).

 
NOTE: It is generally a good idea to keep this setting at 10 to 15 minutes. A Stor that is routinely ingesting new content, contains high item counts, and has many policies may require a higher performance class of database for more aggressive intervals.

 

Example: How to Configure an Alta SaaS Protection Policy

The following example will show you how to create and configure an CASP policy. This instruction can be applied to Retention, Tagging, Indexing, and Statistical policy types.
  • To create a new policy, click 'New Policy'.  The default policy options are below:


     
  • Enter a 'Policy name'.
  • Select the 'Schedule'.  
     
    • One time: This option runs the policy once, and after it has run, the schedule changes to Never.
    • Continuous: This option runs the policy every time the policy evaluation runs (default is 15 minutes).
    • Date range: To schedule the policy, specify a From and To date range to run.
    • Never: Use this option if you are not ready to run the policy or want to stop the policy from running. The time-scheduled policies are converted to 'Never' after they have run.
       
  • Set the 'Action Mode' to either Preview or Production.
     
    • Preview - This mode executes your policy without applying any actions. It is usually a good idea to run policies in Preview mode to start so that you can see the data that will be affected when you switch into Production mode.
    • Production - This mode executes your policy along with any actions. Whatever content meets your policy's selection criteria will have the policy's action applied.
       
  • Toggle the 'Status' option to Enabled if you want it to run.  By default, the status of the policy is disabled; it is saved but will not run.  If left to disabled, the policy will not run during policy evaluation. 
  • To define the policy's 'Selection criteria', add a filter by selecting 'Add a filter', then select a filter from the dropdown menu.  Once you select a filter, configure a value as needed.  Repeat these steps to additional selection criteria.  
    • NOTE: The selection criteria will vary by each Stor type. 


       
  • Finally, once all options are configured, click on the 'Create' button at the bottom. 


     

 

Change the Policy's Name and Settings

At any time, you can edit the name/settings of the policy, select it and the policy details window will open on the right-hand side.  

If you need to modify the filter(s) criteria, simply change that particular filter on the main policy window. 

To remove a filter, click the delete icon next to the filter on the right-hand side.


 

To save changes made to the policy, click the 'Update' button at the bottom of the page.

 
 


Delete a Policy

At any time, you can delete a policy by clicking the ' Delete' icon beside the policy name.  NOTE: It's recommended to leave policies as disabled once they have completed a run instead of deleting them.


 

 

NOTE:  As of CASP 2.18 simply deleting a Tagging Policy will leave orphaned tags on tagged data that cannot be removed from the data in the Admin Portal. It would be better to disable the tagging policy. Or remove the tags from the data before deleting the tagging policy. For more details, review the article How to remove tags from content that were applied by a Tagging Policy.  

 

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