What is Application Allowlisting?

Introduction

Keeping an account of all the applications running on your devices is not an easy task. There are numerous applications running in the background, performing activities you many to be unaware of. Blocking these potentially malicious activities from running on your devices will require you to have a complete understanding and control over what applications should be allowed to run. With an Application Allowlisting in place, this enables you to pre-approved a list of application that can run.

What is Allowlisting?

Allowlisting is policy-driven and will only permits approved application files to run, blocking anything that is not explicitly permitted. Antivirus or other threat detection programs looking for "bad" applications, Allowlisting give you control over what software, scripts, executables, and libraries can run on your servers and workstations. Stopping malicious software and other un-approved applications from running, minimises cyberthreats from running on your network.

Why is Allowlisting Important?

With Allowlisting, you can stop any application from running on your machines and prevent cyberattacks across your device and network. This powerful firewall-like policy driven solution allows you to permit, deny or restrict application access at a granular level. Allowlisting enables the ability to enforcetime-based policies that grant applications access for a specified amount of time and blocking when time has expired. Application patches and system updates file hashes are automatically added to the Allowlisting to prevent approved application from being block after updating. By restricting what applications are approved to run, and when, will limit the options cybercriminals have to run malicious software on devices.  

Conclusion

Allowlisting is not the only solution for cybersecurity, but it is undoubtedly one of the pillars of endpoint security. Complete control over what applications you allow or deny is vital to any business cybersecurity strategy. You can focus on what matters, knowing that only pre-approved applications are running on your devices.

Personos can help you implement Allowlisting as part of theEndpoint Privilege and Application Control management solution , please contact us for more information.

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