Policies are assigned to systems either by inheritance or by assignment.
Inheritance — When a system or group of systems takes its policy settings and client tasks from its parent group. Inheritance is enabled by default.
Assignment — When an administrator assigns a policy to a system or group of systems. You can define a policy once for a specific need, then apply it to multiple locations.
When you copy and paste policy assignments, only the assignments are pasted not the inheritance. The target inherits the policy (for that particular policy category) from its parent.
Note
The inherited policy might be a different policy from the source policy.
Assignment locking
You can lock the assignment of a policy on any group or system. Assignment locking prevents other users from inadvertently replacing a policy. Assignment locking is inherited with the policy settings.
Assignment locking is valuable when you want to assign a certain policy at the top of the System Tree and make sure that no other users remove it.
Assignment locking does not prevent the policy owner from changing policy settings. If you intend to lock a policy assignment, make sure that you are the owner of the policy.