Application Policies

For instructions on configuring Application Control Policies, see Creating an Application Control Policy.

This option allows the administrator to deny application access by blocking any HTTP host name (FQDN - Fully Qualified Domain Name) or L4 port. Using application denial policies, administrators can block specific applications if they are seen to be consuming excessive network resources, or enforce network usage policies such as blocking social media sites.

The following usage guidelines need to be taken into consideration when defining application control policies:

• "www.corporate.com" – This will block access to the host web server at the organization "corporate.com" i.e., the FQDN. It will not block access to any other hosts such as ftp, ntp, smtp, etc. at the organization "corporate.com".
• "corporate.com" – This will block access to all hosts at the domain "corporate.com," i.e., it will block access to www.corporate.com, ftp.corporate.com, smtp.corporate.com, etc.
• "corporate" – This will block access to any FQDN containing the text "corporate" in any part of the FQDN. Care should be taken to use as long as possible string for matching to prevent inadvertently blocking sites that may contain a shorter string match i.e., if the rule is "net" then this will block access to any sites that have the text "net" in any part of the FQDN or ".net" as the FQDN suffix.
• *.corporate.com – This is an invalid rule. Wildcard "*" and other regular expressions cannot be used in any part of the FQDN.
• "www.corporate.com/games" - This is an invalid rule. The filter cannot parse and block access on text after the FQDN, i.e., in this example it cannot filter the microsite "/games".