Policies enforce organizational standards as a means of achieving compliance or consistency over how computing resources are governed. ESAM services make OpenEdge governance possible by accepting a set of conditions about the current state of OpenEdge runtime operations and then applying policies that guide or restrict how those operations should proceed. Some services are accessed internally by OpenEdge components alone, whereas other ESAM services can be made available externally so that other operations can also follow the policies. Together, services and policies govern activities across installed OpenEdge releases or within them. OpenEdge resources such as applications, databases, servers, or other components of OpenEdge installations may have policies set specifically for their governance. Security policies can help ensure that data, resources, configurations, and operations accessed at runtime are appropriate and trusted.