
Web 2.0 applications, such as Facebook, Twitter and Skype are increasing the volume and complexity of your network traffic, and exposing your organization to a new generation of web-based threats and malware. More than ever, it’s important for your business to monitor and control the use of web-based social networking applications cloud-based services in order to safeguard sensitive information and maintain compliance with government regulations and industry best practices.

Traditional firewalls detect and restrict applications by port, protocol and server IP address, and cannot detect malicious content or abnormal behavior in many web-based applications. Fortinet Application Control allows you to identify and control applications on networks and endpoints regardless of port, protocol, and IP address used. It gives you unmatched visibility and control over application traffic, even unknown applications from unknown sources.

Behavioral analysis, end-user association, and application classification can be used to identify and restrict application usage at a granular level. Protocol decoders decrypt and examine network traffic to detect applications attempting to hide their activity through tunneling. Once network traffic is decoded, applications can be identified by their unique signatures and traffic shaping can be applied to restrict or block non-priority applications and traffic.

Fortinet Application Control leverages one of the largest application signature databases available - the FortiGuard® Application Control Database. This enables you to control more than 1,500 different Web-based applications, software programs, network services and network traffic protocols. FortiGuard Services deliver regularly scheduled updates to FortiGate consolidated security appliances, ensuring that Fortinet Application Control always has the latest signatures available.

Application control is essential to manage the explosion of new Internet-based technologies bombarding networks today. Since all Fortinet security technologies are developed in-house, Fortinet Application Control works seamlessly with other Fortinet security technologies including Intrusion Prevention, Data Loss Prevention, Antivirus, Antispam, and Web Filtering to provide complete content protection for your growing business.