Defining a unified access management policy expression that unifies access control policy with events or workflows. Unified management policy information is stored. The unified management policy information defines permissions for access to resources together with events or workflows. A request is received to execute the one or more operations on one or more objects. The requested operation is verified against the unified management rules. Verifying includes performing a single retrieval, retrieving both the access control information and the events or workflows and calculating the applicability of the rule to the conditions represented by the request. Matching rules are applied, access control decisions performed and associated workflows are executed.