Application Categories

The system is capable of discovering thousands of apps; these are divided into categories for ease of reference. Categorization of discoverable apps is conducted by a team of researchers, and based on similarities among apps as well as a number of other quantitative application feature sets.

Category Descriptions

Discovered apps are assigned to the following categories:

• Ad Publishing—Applications that enable publishers and ad networks to manage ad serving and trafficking.
• Anonymizer—Services that provide an anonymous proxy tool that attempts to make activity on the Internet untraceable.
• Application Development and Testing—Applications suited for application development and testing cycles, or for building integration applications in the cloud and within the enterprise.
• Application Protocols —Application layer protocols that govern how data is transmitted and received over a network, enabling different services such as web browsing, email, file transfer, and online transactions as well as allowing software applications to communicate with each other. These include SSH, FTP, SMTP and other such applications.
• Backup and Recovery—Applications for backup and recovery of file systems and raw data stores on servers and desktop systems.
• Business Intelligence—Applications for analytics such as dashboards, reporting systems, scenario modeling, and data analysis.
• Cloud Broker—Applications that manage the use, performance, and delivery of cloud services and negotiate relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers.
• Cloud Carrier—Intermediary that provides connectivity and transport of cloud services between cloud consumers and cloud providers through a network, telecommunication, and other access devices.
• Cloud Service Provider—Based on NIST definition of a cloud service, which we believe is being (slowly) adopted as the industry standard. The NIST definition includes the following criteria: on-demand self-service, rapid elasticity, and measured service. CASI additionally adds vendor intent to provide computing-related services (Compute, Network, Storage and/or Software Application). If in doubt whether web or cloud, we will be conservative and assume cloud until we can prove otherwise.
• Cloud Storage—Applications that offer massively scalable storage capacity that can be used for applications, and file storage.
• Collaboration—Applications that enhance communication and collaboration in workgroups, within enterprises, and across enterprises.
• Compute—Fundamental computing resources for running cloud-based systems that can be dynamically provisioned and configured as needed.
• Content Delivery Network (CDN)—Applications that store content and files to improve the performance and cost of delivering content for web-based systems by offering a large distributed system of servers deployed in multiple data centers across the Internet.
• Content Management—Applications for managing the production of and access to content, enforcing document production workflows, and providing workspaces for groups or enterprises to find and access documents.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)—Applications that manage interactions with current and future customers, including organization and automation across sales, marketing, and customer service functions.
• Database Management—Applications offering scalable data management solutions for structured or unstructured data, relational database solutions or scalable non-SQL datastores.
• E-Commerce—Applications that facilitate the buying and selling of products or services.
• Education—Applications that provide educational or training courses, general learning opportunities or specific employee training independent of their location.
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)—Applications that manage operations or management of a business; which can include internal and external resources, including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources.
• Financial Services—Applications for managing financial processes and information.
• Games—Online and mobile games.
• Generative AI—Applications that enable access to large language models (LLM) and artificial intelligence (AI) tools.
• Healthcare—Applications that provide access to health, medical, and personal fitness systems.
• Hosting Services—Applications that enable corporate or individual websites or other content to be accessible over the internet.
• Human Resources—Applications for managing human resources and HR functions.
• IT Service Management—Applications that support specific IT functions to plan, deliver, operate and control IT services.
• Legal—Applications that provide access to legal documents and public records and support legal content.
• Marketing & Sales—Applications that are specifically designed for marketing and sales functions.
• Media—Applications that host or stream media as a service.
• Office Productivity—Applications for producing information and other standard office-oriented tasks such as documentation, presentations, project management, and so on.
• Others—Used for those services where no existing categorization would fit.
• P2P—Peer to Peer torrents like apps and protocols.
• Search—Web or app-based search.
• Security—Applications that support security activities to ensure adherence to regulatory compliance rules and protect information, data applications, and infrastructure.
• Service Management—Applications that support general operational activities outside of the IT function.
• Shopping—Web or app-based basic online shopping.
• Social Networking—Applications that establish and maintain a connection among users that are tied in one or more specific types of interdependency.
• Software Repository—Software repositories.
• Support—Applications that provide access to customer support services.
• Travel—Applications that provide travel management services.
• Web Content—Mostly app-based services that provide content. It can be through a login or paid portal.

For some applications, you can allow access to the application but block activities such as uploads, downloads, or posting. For more information and a list of applications that support these blocks, see Advanced Application Controls.

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