The corporate application landscape is steadily expanding. Many factors have combined to fuel this growth: the ubiquity of the Internet and associated protocols, the ongoing transition of enterprise applications to web platforms, and the steady increase in easily installed web 2.0 and personal applications (e.g., web mail, IM, Facebook, and file sharing). One result of this expansion is the increasing potential application-borne threats have to evade security countermeasures. Another is to require that IT staff stay vigilant to productivity, bandwidth, and liability and compliance issues.

Application control is one such tool. It enables administrators to accurately identify and control applications based on their behavior, even when disguised or tunneling through other protocols. When delivered as part of a multi-layered approach to network security, application control not only improves your ability to ward off malicious activity, but also mitigates the impact of user-installed software on both bandwidth and productivity (user, help desk, and IT staff), and assists in controlling liability and compliance risks.

This solution guide offers suggestions on how to get the most out of implementing application control in your network. After discussing the expanding applications frontier and its impact on an enterprise, the paper defines application control and reviews the requirements it must meet to deliver the capabilities noted above. There follows an overview of application control in Fortinet FortiOS 4.0 as the basis for the concluding section, which discusses Fortinet technology that allows you to implement application control.