Merging policies

A policy applied to a client is usually the result of multiple policies being merged into one final policy. Policies are merged one by one. When merging policies, the general rule is that the later policy always replaces the settings set by the former one. To change this behavior, you can use policy flags (Available for each setting).

When creating policies, you will notice that some settings have an additional rule (replace/append/prepend) that you can configure.

• Replace—the whole list is replaced, adds new values and removes all previous one.
• Append—items are added to the bottom of the currently applied list (must be another policy, the local list is always overwritten).
• Prepend—items are added to the top of the list (the local list is overwritten).

ESET Endpoint Antivirus supports merging of local settings with the remote policies in a new way. If the setting is a list (for example a list of blocked websites) and remote policy conflicts with an existing local setting, the remote policy overwrites it. You can choose how to combine local and remote lists by selecting the different merging rules for:

• Merging settings for remote policies.
• Merging of remote and local policies—local settings with the resulting remote policy.

To learn more about merging policies, follow the ESET PROTECT Online user guide and see the example.