Best Practices Workflow

This document provides a best practices workflow for implementing Application Control in your environment. Use this document in conjunction with the Application Control Help. While Application Control is designed to minimize your administrative workload, it's important to implement these controls on your endpoints to avoid issues later.

Implement Application Control in your environment in six phases:

1. Patch endpoints and remove any malware prior to introducing Application Control.

2. Use Easy Auditor to create an endpoint whitelist.

3. Define Trusted Change policies to implement in your environment.

4. Review Application Event logs daily and refine your Trusted Change policies in preparation for locking down your endpoints.

5. Lock down your endpoints in phases.

6. Continue to monitor logs regularly to determine when to update your policies.

Don't lock down your endpoints before defining policies, as this increases the likelihood of problems later. Define policies first as described in this guide, and then lock down endpoints.

Communicate with Users

Notify your users that you plan to roll out Application Control and provide an overview of what they can expect. Continue communicating with users during each phase. See Appendix 2 for sample end user communications.