6 Tips for a Successful Application Control & Allowlisting Project
Save time. Use better practices. Comply with ease.
Ready to roll out application control but unsure where to start?
Cyconsol has delivered countless successful Airlock Digital projects, and we have distilled our top insights into this practical guide. Inside, you will find six key focus areas to help you plan, deploy, and maintain a resilient allowlisting capability, built for scale, compliance, and long term impact. Whether you're aiming for Essential Eight maturity or ISO 27001 compliance, this resource helps you fast-start your project.
Here’s our essential guide to help you prepare for a secure, scalable application control and allowlisting deployment.
Effective planning is the cornerstone of a successful application control and allowlisting initiative. The following guidance can help you succeed in preparing for your rollout and help sustain ongoing operational effectiveness.
1. Understand why you’re doing it
Most organisations implement application control because the Australian Signals Directorate’s Essential Eight Mitigation Strategies recommend this as good practice, and they want to adhere to the model. Knowing how application control fits into your security strategy, and understanding what your security risks are, can help you design your environment to meet your needs and establish your priorities.
Here are some key reasons to implement application control:
Preventing Malware Execution – By allowing only approved applications, extensions and executables to run, application control blocks malicious software, reducing the risk of cyberattacks.
Mitigate Vulnerabilities – Cybercriminals often exploit outdated or unpatched applications. Application control can be used to prevent outdated software from running.
Control Shadow IT – It prevents employees from installing or running unauthorised software that could compromise security.
Strengthening System Integrity – By enforcing strict execution policies, organisations can maintain a secure and stable IT environment.
Improving service management – A controlled software environment by its very nature, improves the efficiency of an organisations IT service management.
Enhancing Compliance – Many industries require strict security policies. Application control helps organisations meet regulatory requirements by restricting unauthorised applications.
2. Document your compliance and security objectives
Compliance is a big driver for allowlisting. If you’re implementing application control to meet the Essential Eight model, what maturity level are you aiming for? For those organisations adopting the Australian government’s ISM framework, there is detailed guidance on how application control should be used to address risks.
For organisations looking to be IRAP assessed, or becoming ISO 27001 or SOC2 compliant, a structured approach is essential to meet security and compliance requirements. Organisations looking to reduce the exposure of their systems to malicious code should have a good understanding of the threats you are trying to mitigate. Good application control products give you the opportunity to modify the level of enforcement based on business context, such as the need to support software development. Understanding these scenarios will help you determine the most appropriate elements and functionality of application control that should be enforced, and which controls risk assessed and reduced to support your core business functions. can be.
It’s important to understand what compliance objective you’re trying to achieve - start with the end in mind.
3. Have a good understanding of your software and device inventory
Understanding the scope of your environment will help you scope the resources needed to assess and approve applications. For organisations with a standard SOE build, you’ll know what’s running on machines. For many other organisations, it may require you to set your chosen application control solution to ‘audit mode’, allowing you to discover what’s really running in your environment. The allowlist should cover operating system processes, business-critical applications, and trusted utilities.
Having a full inventory of devices, endpoints, servers and all infrastructure will help you choose the right solution for your application control rollout. For example, if you have non-Windows based endpoints (for example, Apple Macs or Linux platforms) in your environment, you should carefully select an application control solution that can be rolled out to the most endpoints and devices. Consolidating your application control solution not only improves the effectiveness of threat prevention but also impacts operational efficiency and user experience.
For organisations that have BYOD devices, you will need to consider other technology to control access and prevent sensitive data exfiltration, helping to protect corporate data. Consider Mobile Device Management and Data Loss Prevention tools for additional security.
It is important to note that application control will provide visibility into the state of software within your IT environments, but it is not designed as a replacement for other asset and software management tooling.
4. Define how you will establish trust and approve applications
Understand what your organisation determines as good or bad software. Some organisations automatically approve software from trustworthy vendors using digital signatures, for example software and drivers provided by their printer company.
Is the software developed in a foreign country that has no data privacy laws? Could this put your organisation at risk? Setting initial guidelines for software assessment can help you categorise software as low risk, greatly increasing the time to rollout the application control.
Watch for applications that have auto-update features, that could turn an approved piece of software into a risk. Be alert to software vulnerable to supply chain attacks. A third-party library, code snippet, or module incorporated within approved software could turn an approved application into something more vulnerable, providing a gateway into your systems. The nature of some platforms that have high levels of access and authority to run processes can add risk – for example the SolarWinds Orion vulnerability and compromise.
Organisations with a high risk profile such as critical infrastructure providers, may take a ‘block everything’ approach to their environment until each piece of software is assessed by their risk management team.
5. Establish mature software development practices
Ensuring that your own software is approved to run in your environment requires careful consideration.
Use of code signing certificates can speed approval of software for Microsoft environments. However, software written in Python and Java will require additional attention. Make sure your developers have good coding practices and use organised folders for libraries and scripts, enabling the use of trusted paths and processes to control your environment.
Effective allowlist patterns for custom software requires a mix of trusted paths, approved processes and specified publishers.
Consider whether your organisation needs less restrictive development environments to enable teams to deliver key functions. This includes how you may use lower environments (dev, test, pre-prod) to prepare allowlist configurations prior to deployment in production environments, reducing potential disruptions for end users.
6. Decide how are you going to resource, or operationalise, the environment
Realise that your software environment is constantly changing, and new software and systems will be introduced to your environment.
This will require ongoing assessment of new software. This is probably the most important aspect of your project - deciding how to resource the ongoing approval and review of new software. How will users request approval for new applications? Do you block software immediately? Who will do the assessment of new applications? What is the expected response time for approvals? Who will conduct regular audits to ensure old, unused applications are removed?
The team responsible for assessments can depend on the size of your organisation and complexity of the environment. Application assessment could be done by the team responsible for the SOE environment, with the security team providing audit and oversight to the list of approved software and exceptions. Some organisations choose to use a managed service provider to facilitate this. Plan carefully for the ongoing management to ensure your system stays current.
Remember, as is the case with all security tooling, ongoing maintenance and management is critical to the effectiveness of controls and continuing to achieve security objectives.
A mature capability will include a clear operationalisation framework that incorporates clear roles and responsibilities. This includes assigning specific responsibilities to teams responsible for client and server management, tooling maintenance and assurance, tooling troubleshooting and break fix, license management, access control, change control, patching and upgrades just to name a few. A mature approach to application control considers the management of the tooling as a full capability that greatly increases security control and compliance across environments while reducing friction across the user base and IT teams.
Conclusion
By following these six key strategies, organisations can establish a robust and effective application control and allowlisting framework. A well-planned rollout enhances security, minimises risks, and ensures alignment with industry standards such as Essential Eight, ISM, ISO 27001, and SOC 2. However, ongoing management and continuous monitoring are just as critical as the initial setup. Security threats evolve and applications change, requiring a proactive approach.
A structured plan for assessing, approving, and updating software ensures long-term success and protects your environment. With the right tools, policies, and operational processes, organisations can confidently maintain a secure and controlled application landscape.