The ever-growing management complexity of the Internet caused by its rapid growth is seen by some experts as a major problem that limits its usability in the future.
Pervasive Computing not only adds features, but also burdens existing networking infrastructure with more and more tasks that sooner or later will not be manageable by human intervention alone.
In the human body, the autonomic system facilitates and regulates a variety of functions including respiration, blood pressure and circulation, and emotive response.
Autognostics includes a range of self-discovery, awareness, and analysis capabilities that provide the autonomic system with a view on high-level state.
Implicit in such a system are imbedded models of both internal and external environments such that relative value can be assigned to any perceived state - perceived physical threat (e.g. a snake) can result in rapid shallow breathing related to fight-flight response, a phylogenetically effective model of interaction with recognizable threats.
It includes an accounting capability with historical perspective that provides for the tracking of configurations over time, with respect to various circumstances.
In the human nervous system metaphor, these models are implicit in the evolutionary "design" of biological entities and specific to the goals of survival and procreation.
A relatively flexible and abstract framework of values, relationships, roles, interactions, resources, and other components of the network environment is required.
Unless embodied in some system outside the autonomic network or implicit to the specific policy implementation, the framework must also accommodate the definition of process, objectives and goals.
As defensive measures tend to impede the operation of IT, it is optimally capable of balancing performance objectives with typically over-riding threat management actions.
Autodefense deals with forces and processes, typically malicious, outside the normal operation of the system that offer some risk to successful execution.
Autodefense requires high-level and detailed knowledge of the entire network as well as imbedded models of risk that allow it to analyze dynamically the current status.
The detection of network or application behaviors that signal possible attack or abuse is followed by the generation of an appropriate response – for example, ports might be temporarily closed or packets with a specific source or destination might be filtered out.
In metaphor, security parallels the complex mechanisms underlying social interactions, defining friends, foes, mates and allies and offering access to limited resources on the basis of assessed benefit.
In those cases, the system must compensate by making changes that may sacrifice balance on a temporary basis and indeed may violate the operational terms of security itself.