About Consumer and Provider in Policies

The consumer and provider that is specified in a policy serve the following purposes:

• They specify the workloads or Secure Workload agents that receive policy or firewall rules.

• They specify the set of IP addresses to which the firewall rules that are installed on the workloads apply.

If a host has multiple interfaces (IP addresses), policies apply to all interfaces.

The above is the default behavior of how firewall rules are programmed on the workloads. If the IP addresses specified in the firewall rules differ from the IP addresses of the workloads that the policy is installed to, you need to separate the two purposes of consumers and providers in a policy. See Effective Consumer or Effective Provider.