Abstract: A system, apparatus, and method for policy management is provided. The system, apparatus, and method provide a universal policy management solution to unify multiple bespoke systems to enable management of access and other policies in distributed and/or heterogeneous environments. The system, apparatus, and method uses or may be referred to as Identity Query Language or “IDQL.” Policies and user access are defined centrally, and these policies are distributed out to the various bespoke systems. This distribution is aided by a policy gateway, or orchestrator, which acts as a policy mapper and/or API wrapper which accepts IDQL policy configurations, maps them to an imperative identity system, and carries out the IDQL command in the identity systems' native API calls.