Replacing Your Application Control Solution: What I Tell Teams Before They Start

The technology may be changing. The experience, judgment, and operating discipline behind your application control program should come with you. 

One of the questions I hear most often from application control teams is simple: If we replace our current solution, how much of our existing program can we take with us? 

It is a fair question, but the answer is not really about moving a database of rules from one console to another. The valuable part of a mature application control program is the judgment behind those rules: which software the business needs, how it enters the environment, who is allowed to approve it, where exceptions are justified, and what has to happen before enforcement can safely expand. 

That work does not disappear when the product changes. In fact, it is the reason an experienced application control team is usually in a much better position than it thinks. 

Most teams I speak with are not questioning whether application control works. They have already proved that it does. They are questioning whether their current solution is still the enterprise-grade foundation they want to operate for the next several years—and whether the administrative effort, endpoint activity, and management infrastructure required to sustain it are still reasonable. 

Changes in ownership, portfolio strategy, investment priorities, or product direction can understandably contribute to that reassessment. This does not necessarily mean the incumbent solution is disappearing or no longer supported. It does mean customers are justified in taking a fresh look at its architecture, operating model, administrative burden, and long-term fit. 

The Same Control Objective, Different Machinery

Airlock Digital and established application control products share the same objective: controlling what software is permitted to run. Under the hood, however, they may approach that job differently. 

Some traditional application control architectures place significant emphasis on observing file writes and establishing trust as files arrive or change. Airlock Digital is purpose-built around attempted execution. Instead of making a trust decision about every file that lands on disk, Airlock Digital focuses on the point that matters most to application control: whether something is trying to run. 

Different does not mean that an incumbent solution lacks capability. Established products may offer mature, granular controls and extensive integration mechanisms. The relevant comparison is how each approach affects endpoint activity, management infrastructure, policy administration, and the work required to maintain trust in your environment. 

The execution-focused architecture of Airlock Digital is designed to reduce unnecessary endpoint work and present administrators with the activity most relevant to enforcement. It also changes how trust policy is designed. Airlock Digital can make decisions using hashes, publisher and signing information, file metadata, execution context, users or groups, paths, processes, and parent/grandparent process relationships, depending on the workflow and operating system involved. Organizations should validate the resulting endpoint and administrative impact in their own environments. 

For approved software delivery, Trusted Installer policies can establish trust for software subsequently deployed through tools such as Microsoft Intune, Configuration Manager, Jamf, or other validated deployment mechanisms. This allows administrators to define trust around an unapproved delivery workflow rather than approving every resulting component individually. Software already present before the applicable Trusted Installer policy is enabled still requires standard allowlisting. 

My Advice to Application Control Teams

1. Bring your experience—not every rule. Your current policies, inventories, reports, and exception history are valuable because they show why trust decisions were made. Use them as evidence and reference material. Do not assume that every old approval, workaround, or exclusion deserves a permanent home in the new environment.
   
   
2.  Start clean, but do not start blind. A clean policy does not mean ignoring years of operational knowledge. It means separating durable business requirements from accumulated clutter. Review critical applications, software owners, deployment paths, special systems, recurring exceptions, and known problem areas before you begin building policy in Airlock Digital. 
   
   
3.  Define how software becomes trusted. This is where application control succeeds or becomes exhausting. Map the real ways software enters the organization: deployment platforms, updaters, signed applications, scripts, developer builds, administrative tools, and emergency workflows. Then choose the narrowest sustainable trust method for each one. Use contextual policy and audited, time-limited access for legitimate exceptions instead of allowing temporary needs to become permanent policy drift. 
   
   
4. Let evidence—not a calendar—determine enforcement. Start with a representative pilot and observe attempted executions in Audit Mode. Because Airlock Digital focuses on execution activity, the team can tune against what users and systems actually try to run rather than treating every file written to disk as equally important. Test software delivery, exercise exception handling, and confirm the team can explain unexpected events. Move populations into enforcement when the evidence supports it. A fixed 30- or 90-day schedule cannot account for the diversity of every environment. 
   
   
5.  Judge the operating model, not just the feature list. Pay attention to endpoint impact, event volume, the clarity of policy decisions, temporary access controls, administrative effort, infrastructure requirements, integrations, and the experience of the people who will run the program. Include the management plane in that comparison. Airlock Digital provides a lightweight architecture and flexible hosted or customer-managed options intended to reduce the server and software footprint required to operate application control. A replacement should make the control easier to sustain, not simply reproduce the same workload in a different console. 

You Are Not Starting Over

Teams that have successfully operated application control have already completed the hardest part of application control. They understand their software estate, have negotiated the organizational challenges, and know that exceptions and software change—not the deny decision itself—are where the real work happens. 

The opportunity with Airlock Digital is to carry that hard-earned knowledge into an execution-focused, lighter, workflow-driven operating model. Some trust decisions will be expressed differently. Some old configuration should be left behind. That is not lost work; it is a chance to keep what remains valid and remove what no longer serves the program. 

My advice is straightforward: preserve the intent, rebuild deliberately, and require the new solution to improve the daily reality of running application control.