Legacy solutions not designed for large, complex environments have stopped many enterprises from deploying application control. Issues with scale, performance, and siloed tools drove a belief that application control was time-consuming and difficult for the enterprise.
However, times have changed.
Our new Enterprise Buyer’s Guide examines how modern, practitioner-designed application control solutions are ready for the enterprise. These solutions are built to be flexible and scalable to deploy successfully across diverse, distributed environments.
To help your enterprise application control purchasing decision, we’ve created a checklist and the guide itself outlines your must-haves for enterprise deployment. We’ve summarized a few of these below:
Strong but Lightweight
Historically, application control endpoint agents have been known for their bloated architectures. These resource-intensive legacy agents can degrade system responsiveness and make deployment at scale both challenging and costly.
However, modern application control agents are engineered to be lightweight and efficient, enforcing policies in real time without noticeable performance degradation. This makes them ideal for end-user systems and mission-critical servers.
Support for Current and Legacy OS
Traditional application control solutions often focus on recent versions of Windows, offering limited or no support for other operating systems. They also may not cover legacy OS versions running in many IT and OT environments.
This partial coverage leaves security teams questioning the value of tools that leave clear gaps in endpoint security.
However, modern solutions support major operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, and extend to legacy versions. Security teams can extend application control policies to every device, reducing risk and streamlining administration.
A Range of Trust Models
Unlike legacy products that offer only a limited number of trust models, modern solutions provide a range of approaches. These include support for trust mechanisms such as hash, path, publisher, and parent-level controls. Built with a goal of flexibility, security teams can use the appropriate criteria to determine which applications, files, or scripts should be allowed to execute.
Complements Other Security Products
Legacy application control solutions have been difficult to integrate, lacking standardized APIs, data export capabilities, or interoperability with core security infrastructures. As a result, organizations often deployed application control in an effective silo, disconnected from broader workflows and visibility efforts.
By contrast, today’s solutions are designed for integration to complement and elevate other security products in the stack. These include Security Information and Event Management tools, logging tools, and more.
We examine these and other essential application control buying criteria in our Application Control Buyer's Guide and Checklist. This invaluable resource is your key to proactive, effective cybersecurity.