According to JT Keating, CoreTrace's vice president of marketing, because whitelisting takes an opposing approach to fighting malware, it is only natural that people think that you can only use one or the other.
This is, he says, just not true, owing to the fact that, because today's attack software is so prolific, traditional antivirus can no longer keep up with the tens of thousands of new malware and malware variants that surface each day.
"However, this doesn't mean organisations should drop antivirus altogether. They should continue to take advantage of the valuable information blacklist-based solutions provide to help identify as many `known bad' applications out there as possible", he says.
"On the flip side, application whitelisting blocks any unauthorised applications from executing on a system, in essence allowing only `known good' applications to run", he adds in his latest security blog.
Keating goes on to say that many of today's leading whitelisting solutions include cloud-based blacklists to clean up systems without impacting the performance of the system.
The bottom line, he notes, is that combining application whitelisting as the primary mechanism for preventing the execution of unknown and malicious applications - with cloud-based blacklists for reporting and compliance purposes - covers both known and unknown malware code from exploiting a system.
And, he explains, it does so in a way that does not impact performance.
"While we agree that whitelisting enforcement alone is not a complete replacement for antivirus, an anti-malware strategy that includes both whitelisting and blacklisting for application control gives organisations the best of both worlds for defending their network endpoints from more prolific attacks."