Policy-Based Endpoint Isolation That Contains Malware Without Detection

Blue Planet-works is the Japanese company behind AppGuard, formed as a joint venture that took over the AppGuard endpoint product line from the US firm Blue Ridge Networks in 2017, backed by an investor group that included ANA Holdings and Dentsu. It announced a change of corporate name to AppGuard Co., Ltd. effective April 1, 2026. Its customers are Japanese organizations ranging from single users to companies with tens of thousands of employees, concentrated in healthcare, manufacturing, government, travel, and utilities.

AppGuard does not attempt to identify malicious files. It applies a policy model the company calls hardening: only the instructions an application legitimately needs for business work are permitted to execute, so unauthorized process launches, memory injection, and writes into protected system areas are blocked whether or not the code is recognized. Because nothing is matched against signatures or behavioral models, unknown malware and zero-day exploits are contained at the moment of execution rather than after an alert fires.

The line covers four editions: Workstation for centrally managed enterprise endpoints, Server for on-premises and cloud servers, Solo for individual or small-team machines, and Home Edition for consumers. Workstation and Server are available on subscription or perpetual licenses. The company positions AppGuard as a containment layer that runs alongside antivirus and EDR rather than replacing them, and reports more than 22,000 cumulative corporate deployments in Japan as of early 2026 across healthcare, transport, steel, and public sector accounts.