Broad and Deep Coverage, Yet Easy to Use

App-ID supports a comprehensive set of applications and application functions, organized by categories, technologies, risk and so on. This enables your organization to transition to a positive enforcement model and explicitly define which applications and application functions are allowed. In addition, you can create your own App-IDs for internal or custom applications.

"Unknown traffic," which is unrecognized by predefined and custom App-IDs, can be treated as its own category and explicitly managed with a variety of enforcement options based on your organization’s risk profile. This flexible handling of unknown traffic is unique to Palo Alto Networks.

Security Policies That Enable Your Business

Applications and application functions are foundational elements for policy in our next-generation firewalls. Security policies can also specify dynamic application filters that apply enforcement to groups of applications that meet a combination of criteria, for example, by blocking file-sharing peer-to-peer applications or high-risk encrypted-tunnel applications. This automatically keeps your security rules up to date with new applications that match the criteria.

Extensive Visibility and Reporting

The Application Command Center (ACC) shows a highly interactive, graphical view of application, URL, threat and data traffic. The ability to drill down from high-level information to individual log entries makes it possible to get answers to important questions fast.

Predefined and custom reports help you share insights with others. One of the predefined reports is the SaaS Application Usage report, which shows the top sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS applications running on your network. This helps you assess risks to the security of your network, such as the delivery of malware through SaaS applications adopted by your users.