AppSense looks to secure end users with Strata platform

Security and management specialist AppSense has released Strata, a sandbox platform designed to help users isolate personal applications on company-owned systems.

The company said that the free platform would integrate with Windows desktops, creating a protected sandbox which isolates applications and prevents malicious or untrusted applications from accessing system resources.

AppSense chief technology officer Harry Labana told V3 the Strata tool is part of an effort by the company to help secure systems without limiting the ability for users to install and run applications when needed.

"It is really trying to address this conversation in the industry of user-installed applications," Labana said.

"There is a lot of conversation around if you are doing virtual desktop infrastructure, how do you deal with that last mile of applications?"

Rather than appear as a virtual machine on the desktop, Labana said the Strata platform appears as an invisible layer to the end user, allowing applications to appear alongside those which run outside of the protected mode.

Additionally, Strata allows for installation of applications without the need for administrator credentials, a feature which lets users run new software while maintaining secured non-administrator account permissions.

While AppSense is offering Strata as a free tool for end users, the company suggests that businesses consider combining the platform with other policy control and management platforms to provide better management.

Labana said that ultimately the goal of the platform was to encourage businesses to take a new approach to the way they view application security.

"They typically break it down into if you extract the OS from the applications and user and manage them separately everything is good," he said. "But when you think about applications, different categories of applications need to be managed in a different way."