ManageEngine Application Control Plus Review

Holistic Approach to Application Management

ManageEngine Application Control Plus allows you to take a proactive and holistic approach to application management. This tool is useful especially in protecting your organization and its entire network from known and unknown cyber threats, including malware intrusions, zero-day attacks, and advanced persistent threats.

Instead of relying on anti-virus programs and security patches which often take some time to be successfully deployed, the software enables you to whitelist and blacklist applications in a simplified manner. This way, you are ensured that only safe and trusted applications are running on various devices on your network. Likewise, you can instantly block applications that have vulnerabilities which cybercriminals and hackers might exploit. 

ManageEngine Application Control Plus also allows you to blacklist applications that are not important to the daily operations of your organization. Many of these applications are used by lower-level employees for social media, gaming, and chatting and not for work-related activities. Therefore, blacklisting such applications helps you improve your employees’ productivity. 

The software, furthermore, simplifies your efforts when it comes to handling your inventory of applications. By creating application whitelists and blacklists, you no longer need to waste time and money managing licenses, updates, and patches for non-essential or unused applications. 

Policy-Based  Whitelisting & Blacklisting

With ManageEngine Application Control Plus, you get the capability to create policies that determine which applications should run on your network and which ones must be blocked. This means you can set up various whitelists and blacklists of applications based on the specific policies and rules you configured within the software. 

For instance, you can whitelist applications if the vendors who built those applications have valid certificates. This prevents you from installing and running applications created by vendors using open source code, as such applications are vulnerable to malware attacks, data theft, and other security threats. 

You can also set product name as a rule for whitelisting and blacklisting applications. Thus, you can run or block applications if their names are included in a certain application list. You can apply this rule when you only want to use some specific software products provided by the same vendor. 

Additionally, ManageEngine Application Control Plus lets you perform whitelisting and blacklisting at the level of the applications’ executable files. For instance, the software enables you to verify if the digital certificates of the files contained in an application are authentic or tampered. Those files with unauthentic or tampered certificates are blacklisted and can’t be executed. 

Application Access Management

The application control software is built with features that aid you in ensuring that business-critical applications are accessed only by the right users in your organization. One of those features is the ability to create custom groups of users that you can link with specific or multiple application lists. With this feature, employees can access whitelisted applications that are exclusively related to their roles, activities, or needs. You can set up multiple application whitelists for the same group or allow various groups to access the same application whitelist. 

Furthermore, the software permits you to grant administrator privileges to selected user groups. This allows the individuals belonging in these groups to access applications that can only be run in administrator mode. You can organize these applications into privileged application lists. This feature prevents you from providing excessive administrator privileges to employees, which they might exploit to gain access and control over endpoints and applications beyond their responsibilities and requirements.