Disclosed embodiments are a computing system and a computer-implemented method related to minimizing the number of rules/policies needed to be stored to enforce those rules/policies. The minimizing comprising generating adjacency data structures mapping as adjacent pairs of network nodes, which are allowed to communicate with one another according to the plurality rules, and applying them for pruning the rule dataset. This allows an original set of rules/policies to be reduced into a smaller set, which conserves computational resources.