A policy is a rule that determines access. For example, a rule could be that only people with names that start with “S” get access to specific resources. Other examples of policies could be duration of access or requiring manager approval before giving access. Policies allow an organization to scale access via these dynamic rules. Although policies is a fairly generic term across the industry, it has a very specific meaning in systems like AWS. It’s important to figure out what a policy is according to the system you’re using.