Manageability reflects the ease in which the system as a whole can be managed. The management of a system could include controlling the flow of data and assigning access rights, through to managing the maintenance of the system. This, for example, can be particularly important in business environments where managers might need to ensure rigid control over the system.
Given that nodes within a P2P system possess a degree of autonomy it can be difficult to provide the same level of manageability that more traditional client-server systems might possess. Without a single centralised location for the storage of data it can be hard to track which nodes possess a copy of specific data and how up to date it is. Similarly it cannot be assumed that all nodes within a P2P system will regularly update the software that they are running.