Configuring WatchGuard's Application Control

This video will show you how to setup WatchGuard’s Application Control. This service, included in both Basic Security Suite and Total Security Suite, gives you the ability to block rogue applications including games, music streaming, and file sharing.

One of the most important subscriptions services on WatchGuard firewalls, Application Control allows you to stop applications from reaching out to the internet. For example, Skype and Xbox are applications built into Windows 10, these applications are very chatty, and will constantly reach out to the internet. Application Control gives you the ability to stop those services.

We recommend that you start by blocking the categories of “Games”, “Peer-to-peer networks”, and “Tunneling and proxy services” should all be blocked out of the gate. These services can cause significant stability and more importantly, security issues for you. Following that, we suggest you take time to look through the individual applications, and block anything off of that that doesn’t need to be used.

After you’ve set up a Profile, you need to make sure it gets applied to the users on your network. You’ll need to go to the “Policies” tab and make sure that WatchGuard Application Control gets applied to all outgoing policies. 

WatchGuard is consistently updating Application Control by adding new applications to the service as they come out. This means it’s a great idea to go through the list of applications every month or so to make sure that WatchGuard Application Control is configured the way you want it.