Fortinet recently conducted an informal poll through the company’s blog that asked visitors if they were currently using app control as part of their security strategy.
Out of 261 respondents, 75% said “yes,” they were using some form of application control in their network. 14% said, “What’s application control?,” which is just a little bit disconcerting considering all of the new threat vectors we’re seeing out there occurring at the application layer. And interestingly, 11% said “no.”
Good news and bad news with this latest poll. The good news is that 3 out of 4 respondents are currently using application control as part of their security strategy. That’s great, as application layer attacks are continuing to increase in their quantity, variety and sophistication.The FortiGuard Application Control Encyclopedia lists 219 different ‘high-risk’ applications. Those of you who are utilizing application control are doing the right thing to protect your organization from those attacks.
Yet, there are a total of 2,225 different applications in the FortiGuard database (as of July 17). Most of these do not pose a direct risk and many are quite useful, such as Skype or Spotify. Those organizations that are applying application control can decide if they want their users to be running such apps or they can decide to allow certain individuals or groups of users to run these apps, while denying them to others. This technology gives you the power to control applications, which brings the combined benefit of protecting against malicious apps while at the same time increasing network efficiency and improving user productivity.
Application Control is also commonly used in the workplace to give administrators accurate readings into application usage and respective bandwidth consumption. Many organizations also take advantage of Application Control to conduct risk assessments and bandwidth analysis to determine what type of applications are being used on their network. Organizations can subsequently take steps to block malicious or offensive apps, as well as limit time-wasters and bandwidth consumers– all while applying role based application policies.
