Modern application control solutions provide flexible exception or temporary access options, making it easy to trust policies at scale and enable administrators to block unwanted applications with precision.
In previous blogs, we’ve covered the role of modern architecture and deployment capabilities in delivering scalable application control to the enterprise. Every aspect of a practitioner-developed application control solution is geared to delivering the right trust to the right people at the right time.
Our new guide, Modern Application Control: 12 Key Considerations for Enterprise Buyers, explains how today’s solutions remove time and complexity from application control.
Precise Blocklisting to Neutralize Unwanted Applications
Today’s solutions dispense with the limited and inflexible blocklisting functionality of many traditional application control tools. When supporting blocklisting by hash, path, and metadata attributes, the most advanced tools enable security teams to precisely target and neutralize unwanted applications.
Today’s solutions also cover browser extensions, which are overlooked by traditional application control products despite being a common attack vector for phishing, data leakage, and unauthorized access. Leading products offer dedicated browser extension controls that allow administrators to block or approve extensions across Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.
This adds another layer of endpoint defense, which is particularly important in environments where SaaS and web applications are critical.
Apply Trust Policies at Scale
Scaling policies across thousands of endpoints with traditional tools often requires repetitive manual configuration.
However, modern application control solutions offer intuitive bulk upload features and make it easy to build baselines for different segments of the endpoint portfolio. These features allow administrators to model, test, and apply large-scale trust policies in a controlled manner, ensuring quicker time-to-value and more efficient policy evolution.
Overcome Traditional User Management and Access Control Limitations
In some application control environments, user management and access control are often afterthoughts. A lack of granular permission structures in traditional solutions forces organizations to centralize control of policies and administration to a small team of highly privileged users.
Modern application control solutions overcome the limitations of this approach, through support for industry-standard services and protocols, including role-based access control (RBAC), domain security group mapping, and SAML-based authentication.
Modern solutions eschew cumbersome exception and temporary access processes for flexible, easy-to-manage options like One-Time Passwords (OTP), self-service, and in-app requests. These built-in capabilities streamline exception handling end-to-end to reduce friction, minimize delays, and enable seamless collaboration between security and business teams.
Reduce Risk with Policy Change History
Observability and auditing of configuration changes is critical to improving management and reducing risk, so modern solutions allow customers to track every policy change, who made it, when and why.
The outcome? Comprehensive change visibility, which is critical at enterprise scale, enabling teams to manage policies collaboratively with confidence.
For more information about how today’s application control solutions provide enterprise-class management features, check out some of the resources listed below: