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.