Airlock Digital: Application Whitelisting

The AustCyber Projects Fund is a $15 million, three-year initiative designed to help the Australian cyber security industry grow and take ideas global. Since launching in 2018, AustCyber has provided this funding to projects that are making a real contribution to growing Australia’s cyber security ecosystem, guided by the Sector Competitiveness Plan.

One of the participants in AustCyber’s Projects Fund was Airlock Digital, who used their involvement in the Projects Fund program to redevelop their Airlock Digital Application Control Platform to a true SaaS platform. This allows them to better support their MSP and SME customers.

Airlock Digital had already developed an industry-leading allow listing (formerly Application Whitelisting) platform which supported enterprise customers across many industry verticals including Federal Government agencies. The existing solution was suitable for individual deployments and was not a true cloud-native solution as it was largely based on singular IaaS workloads. To support MSP and SME customers, Airlock Digital required a true multi-tenant SaaS solution that could auto-scale, make efficient use of cloud resources and enable the business to streamline the (traditional) enterprise sales process through automated billing and customer onboarding. This was a strategic play for the organisation’s future – to enable it to remain competitive as an Australian organisation in a global endpoint security market, to make allow listing more accessible to the wider markets (SMBs, MSPs, MSSPs), and to provide forward-thinking, proactive endpoint security to SMBs.

“The resulting system enables MSPs and Airlock Digital to onboard new customers in a few clicks, while the system itself automatically right-sizes to service the current system demand.”

To deliver a scalable platform that can service organisations ranging from 10 computers up to millions of endpoints, the Airlock Digital platform required a complete redesign. The product was developed from scratch on a cloud-native Kubernetes architecture, which enables MSPs and Airlock Digital to onboard new customers in a few clicks, while the system itself automatically right-sizes to service the current system demand. These items together, eliminate the overhead costs associated with selling to SMB customers and support hyperscale deployments. Ultimately, the new Airlock Cloud platform enables Airlock Digital to bring low-cost, easy-to-deploy allow listing to more customers across Australia and abroad.

The Australian Government’s Essential Eight Mitigation Strategies from ACSC has been adopted within Australia as the de facto standard for endpoint security. While Federal Government agencies and enterprise-level organisations are increasingly adopting this standard, it is difficult for SMBs to easily implement the most important strategies outlined in the Essential Eight.

Airlock Digital enables the practical deployment of the Application Control requirement within the framework, thereby enabling SMBs to implement Application Control and comply with the Essential Eight Mitigation Strategies. This significantly increases the security posture of Australian organisations and enables them to defend against ransomware, malware and targeted attacks. Airlock Digital’s new cloud platform opens doors for MSPs and MSSPs to offer services to their customers and help them comply with the Essential Eight.

About Airlock Digital

Airlock Digital delivers forward-thinking endpoint protection solutions which enable organisations to implement rapid, scalable allow listing and execution control. Developed by security practitioners who possess a first-hand understanding of the operational challenges in implementing allow listing at scale, Airlock Digital offers an intuitive and scalable cyber security, solution set, and is currently positioned as the leading commercial allow listing vendor worldwide.

Learn more about Airlock Digital on their website.

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Find out more about the other projects involved with the AustCyber Projects Fund.