Improved approaches for communicating changes to security policies (or rules) in a distributed security system are disclosed. Depending on the status of an affected user in the system, the changes can be delivered to the user if the user is logged in the system or effectuated in a state message in a local server and the state message is delivered to the user next time the user is logged in the system. If a local server is not operative at the time that a change request is received for a user of the local server, the change request is redirected to another local server. The user is directed to the another local server to affect the change request. As a result, various changes are guaranteed to be delivered to the affected users without compromising the network efficiency.