Application Whitelisting focuses on going through a process of creating a list of applications required by the business, based on various user roles and activities, which effectively means that any unapproved applications (which includes malicious code that may have found its way into your environment) not part of the Whitelist will not work. It is part of the Essential Eight risk mitigation strategy by the Australian Signals Directorate.

Application Whitelisting is important for these reasons:

• It allows only trusted apps to run.
• It protects against zero-day attack.
• It reduces overall IT TCO due to the lesser effort required by IT to fix security issues.

We discussed in more detail why Application Whitelisting is essential for every business in this blog.