One of the jobs of the GlobalProtect agent is to collect information about the host it is running on. The agent then submits this host information to the GlobalProtect gateway upon successfully connecting. The gateway matches this raw host information submitted by the agent against any HIP objects and HIP profiles you have defined. If it finds a match, it generates an entry in the HIP Match log. Additionally, if it finds a HIP profile match in a policy rule, it enforces the corresponding security policy.

Using host information profiles for policy enforcement enables granular security that ensures that the remote hosts accessing your critical resources are adequately maintained and in adherence with your security standards before they are allowed access to your network resources. For example, before allowing access to your most sensitive data systems, you might want to ensure that the hosts accessing the data have encryption enabled on their hard drives. You can enforce this policy by creating a security rule that only allows access to the application if the client system has encryption enabled. In addition, for clients that are not in compliance with this rule, you could create a notification message that alerts users as to why they have been denied access and links them to the file share where they can access the installation program for the missing encryption software (of course, to allow the user to access that file share you would have to create a corresponding security rule allowing access to the particular share for hosts with that specific HIP profile match).