The variety of applications is continuously and sometimes even drastically increasing - reinforced by the trend that enterprise applications are increasingly migrating towards web platforms and Web 2.0 is making life more difficult for administrators with a multitude of simple and often privately used applications (webmail, instant messaging, social media such as Twitter and Facebook, etc.). This creates new challenges for IT security, as many of these applications have new security vulnerabilities that can bypass traditional defences. Furthermore, IT managers are faced with the problem of maintaining employee productivity despite such often time-consuming applications (chat, games, etc.) and maintaining infrastructure reliability, even though these applications often require very high bandwidth (video/audio downloads or streaming). Increasingly, compliance regulations also play a role, placing further demands on IT departments.

• How it works: Application control provides a tool that enables administrators to target individual applications - even if they use non-standard ports or use permitted protocols as tunnels. As part of a multi-layer security architecture, application control enables granular control of application behaviour and thus positively influences the bandwidth, performance, stability and reliability as well as the compliance of the IT infrastructure.
• Integration as added value: It is important not to understand application control as an isolated component of IT security, because this leads to a reactive approach to the security strategy. Rather, it usefully complements, and ideally integrates with, existing defences such as firewall, VPN, AntiVirus, IPS and web filtering. Companies are increasingly suffering from the far too heterogeneous structure - not only in IT security environments - which is based on so-called point solutions, i.e. niche solutions. These only integrate to a limited extent or not at all, are difficult to administer due to their diversity and often increase the operating costs of a company considerably without being noticed.