Group sanctioned applications to simplify administration of your
rulebases.
An application group is an object that contains applications that you want to treat
similarly in policy. Application groups are useful for enabling access to
applications that you explicitly sanction for use within your organization. Grouping
sanctioned applications simplifies the administration of your rulebases. Instead of
having to update individual security rules when there is a change in the applications
you support, you can update only the affected application groups.
When deciding how to group applications, consider how you plan to enforce access to
your sanctioned applications and create an application group that aligns with each
of your policy goals. For example, you might have some applications that you will
only allow your IT administrators to access, and other applications that you want to
make available for any known user in your organization. In this case, you would
create separate application groups for each of these policy goals. Although you
generally want to enable access to applications on the default port only, you may
want to group applications that are an exception to this and enforce access to those
applications in a separate rule.