To safely enable applications on your network, the Palo Alto Networks next-generation firewalls provide both an application and web perspective—App-ID and URL Filtering—to protect against a full spectrum of legal, regulatory, productivity, and resource utilization risks.

App-ID enables visibility into the applications on the network, so you can learn how they work and understand their behavioral characteristics and their relative risk. This application knowledge allows you to create and enforce security policy rules to enable, inspect, and shape desired applications and block unwanted applications. When you define policy rules to allow traffic, App-ID begins to classify traffic without any additional configuration.

New and modified App-IDs are released as part of Applications and Threat Content Updates—follow the Best Practices for Applications and Threats Content Updates to seamlessly keep your application and threat signatures up-to-date.