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 administration of your rulebases. Instead of having to
update individual policy 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.