The 5 Advantages of Transitioning from Legacy Patching & Vulnerability Management Tools to Modern Solutions

CIOs and CISOs can significantly ease the usual pain points associated with transitioning out of legacy vulnerability management systems by offering complete, accurate, and real-time visibility into every managed and unmanaged endpoint in an organisation.

Technology leaders must be actively considering a move away from legacy IT — or else they may find themselves playing an expensive and risky game of catch-up. Last year, a Gartner survey of CIOs in Australia and New Zealand found that legacy infrastructure was the top technology CIOs are planning on decreasing their investment into in the next 12 months, with some 50% of CIOs planning on a divestment in this area.

This blog explores the five advantages of transitioning from legacy patching and vulnerability management tools to modern solutions.

1. Improved visibility — you can’t protect what you don’t know you have

With the advent of working from home and hybrid workforces, the sheer number of devices connected to an organisation’s technology infrastructure has boomed. Tanium research found that up to 20% of endpoints are unknown in 94% of organisations, which excludes a huge amount of endpoints from the auditing and vulnerability management process.

When it comes to vulnerability management, legacy approaches have typically pigeonholed security teams into one specific area: vulnerability scanning and identification. Vulnerability scanning is often perceived as the be-all-and-end-all of vulnerability management, and this could not be further from the truth — identification is merely the first step. It must be followed through properly with an end goal to mitigate and remediate risk.

Consider this — organisations grow the attack surface every time they adopt a new cloud service or provision more endpoints to support business growth and digital transformation. With an ever-evolving perimeter vulnerable to new attacks, management of the vulnerabilities cannot and should not end with scanning and reporting. It must go beyond that and include the continuous and real-time discovery, inventory, classification, and monitoring of an organisation’s entire IT infrastructure.

Simply stated, you must know what you are dealing with. IT teams cannot safeguard or patch what they cannot see — and this includes everything from on-premises and cloud-based assets. Continually updated visibility of endpoints by the security team is crucial for two reasons:

1. It is essential for the day-to-day maintenance and hygiene of vulnerability management.
 
2. In the event of a zero-day or another cyber incident, the first thing the board wants to know is the level of exposure to the organisation. As a CIO/CISO, having this strong data observability and endpoint visibility can be the difference between determining the severity of a zero-day exposure in minutes versus days or weeks.

Tanium eliminates the core fundamental challenge of a lack of insight into the number and state of every endpoint, as well as the associated patches and vulnerabilities, not just for today but on a continuous basis. Once IT teams fully understand what they’re dealing with, managing, remediating, and reporting progress suddenly becomes much easier.

2. Understanding the cost of change vs. the cost of doing nothing

When it comes to vulnerability management, the cost of doing nothing, which also encompasses ‘business as usual’ vulnerability and exploit operations, can far outstrip the initial upfront costs associated with upgrading your vulnerability management platform. IBM research shows that the average cost of a data breach in Australia has grown 32 percent in the last five years, with businesses averaging a cost of AUD$4.03 million per data breach in 2023.

Meeting regulatory requirements

In Australia, where pressure from regulators continues to mount and customer trust is increasingly contingent on data security and privacy, competitive technology leaders understand that the cost of unchecked vulnerabilities has never been higher. And yet, Tanium’s local team in Australia regularly meets with businesses struggling to keep up with 1500 or more newly identified vulnerabilities a month.

The switch can be so simple — instead of simply reporting the number of vulnerabilities, Tanium can assist both IT teams and security teams with switching gears to focus on actually resolving those vulnerabilities, ensuring long-term business resilience.

Stamping out inefficient siloes

Legacy systems create friction because they are not designed for collaboration nor provide a single source of truth.

This ultimately causes friction between two siloed departments — IT and security — leading to unproductive teams, cross-departmental tension, and wasted resources.

What results is one team often feels like they need to clean up the other’s mess. Security and operations teams are often using incomplete, dated information provided by legacy vulnerability management tools, which results in both teams swimming in data and vulnerabilities that never become fully remediated.

This leads to ongoing friction between two crucial business units that need to function seamlessly together to ensure operational efficiency and sound cybersecurity protection for the organisation.

This friction can be counterproductive, discourage collaboration, and impact business outcomes. Instead, these teams should be working in tandem and feel motivated to support each other’s work. This breaking down of siloes, enabled by modern solutions, will allow all teams to share data more effectively and work on the lifecycle of the vulnerability in a way that eases frustrations for everyone involved.

By implementing modern solutions, organisations can achieve the visibility and control necessary to efficiently manage their digital environments. There should be a real-time view of all endpoints to facilitate the rapid identification and remediation of vulnerabilities. This proactive stance not only bolsters an organisation’s security but also streamlines operations and reduces costs in the long run.

3. Answers at speed and scale

Modern solutions can provide real-time data and reporting that legacy platforms cannot.

When real-time data is taken directly from the endpoint, security teams can better contextualise and correlate alerts with almost no delay across the entire IT infrastructure. Armed with real-time data, as opposed to outdated information that may no longer be accurate due to latency, incident responders will have the ability to take immediate action on alerts as they happen. Whether that action is quarantining a device, deploying a patch, or even simply communicating with their superior on the best course of action, real-time monitoring and reporting gives organisations the benefit of proactive, predictive management over all endpoints.

The key challenge with legacy tools is that they are slow and, therefore, inaccurate. This presents a problem for IT security teams, who are typically tasked with keeping endpoints patched and updated in a timely manner. Tanium research showed that before adopting Tanium, organisations’ endpoints often went unpatched for more than 150 days, exposing them to potential threats and breaches.

With traditional, legacy tools, teams often come to accept “good enough” patch visibility and coverage rates of 70% or less. Such rates leave thousands of unpatched assets in your environment, leaving malicious actors welcome to create just one breach to compromise the whole ecosystem.

With Tanium, customers typically create 99% patch visibility and compliance within 24 hours of installing our platform. Regis Aged Care, for example, went from 1% compliant to 98% compliant just by implementing a single Tanium workflow for workstation patching.

Modern solutions like Tanium give a competitive edge by locating information on required patches and discovering vulnerable or compromised machines in seconds. Doing all of this on a single control plane allows devices to be patched in seconds, and critical security controls can be implemented, ensuring ongoing compliance.

4. Certainty of remediation

Speed is not the only factor — to be fast is beneficial, but it only moves the needle for an organisation if it can be done at scale, too, with a certainty of remediation. Legacy tools don’t commonly have the architecture to be able to communicate with all devices at speed and at scale. It is usually difficult to tell if a patch has been installed successfully or at all, and it can take many days or even weeks to gather that information with any accuracy.

Having linear chain architecture enables each machine to communicate with the next and report back information quickly across thousands of endpoints, including the progress of the patch installation or configuration change. This is extremely important because incomplete or ineffective patching can lead to organisation instability or security failures. Certainty of remediation ensures that patches are applied correctly, minimising the risk of downtime or other operational issues.

Having a certainty of remediation is a blessing for IT teams because if there is department-wide confidence that a patch has been successfully applied, efforts can be focused on other critical tasks rather than repeatedly addressing the same vulnerabilities.

Using Tanium, organisations are now able to see and remediate vulnerabilities at 99+% efficacy, reducing their risk exposure and improving their compliance posture. The speed to address and to address at scale will only become increasingly important as vulnerabilities continue to be exploited by cybercriminals at faster and more widespread rates.

Ensuring that vulnerabilities are effectively remediated provides confidence that systems are protected against known threats. This is essential for maintaining the overall security posture of an organisation.

5. Automation

By leveraging automation that is available in modern platforms, organisations can bid farewell to the manual processes required by legacy patching and vulnerability management systems. Automation used for security has an array of benefits, including enhancing posture, achieving operational efficiency, ensuring compliance, and effectively managing risks associated with endpoint vulnerabilities.

Automation can make both IT and security teams more effective and efficient, using orchestration capabilities that automate complex tasks, make them repeatable, and execute them in real time.

Unlike legacy platforms, which rely on intervention to manually scan and identify vulnerabilities, automated systems can help ensure patches are applied consistently and correctly across all endpoints. Regular testing and validation processes confirm that patches have been applied successfully and are effective in mitigating the vulnerabilities before they are created.

Automation tools like Tanium’s provide a centralised dashboard for managing patches across all endpoints, enhancing visibility and control. The real-time nature of the updates means IT teams can receive real-time updates on patch status, allowing for swift action if issues are detected.

Conclusion

Vulnerability management needs to be redefined from the top down. As the number of vulnerabilities grows, so does the need for a top-tier patch and vulnerability management solutions like Tanium’s.

Tanium provides a gold standard for managing vulnerabilities through encompassing real-time visibility, control, and automation across all endpoints within an organisation. Tanium’s Patch, Deploy, and Comply take care of remediation, allowing organisations to respond to and resolve vulnerabilities and threats in a coordinated manner. It enables real-time actions to isolate, investigate, and remediate compromised endpoints.

To learn more about how Australian CIOs can effectively transition away from legacy vulnerability systems, download Tanium’s new whitepaper — Redefining Vulnerability Management: Transforming Legacy Approaches for Modern Cyber Resilience.

Find out more about Tanium’s suite of products to usher in modern vulnerability management:

• Gain visibility, control, and remediation for all endpoints with Tanium Converged Endpoint Management (XEM)
• IT operations teams can keep systems up to date with automated patching across the enterprise at speed and scale with Tanium Patch
• Monitor your entire IT estate for risk with Tanium Risk & Compliance
• Gain insights into vulnerabilities with Tanium Guardian
• Simplify, centralise, and unify policy and configuration management with Tanium Enforce
• Quickly assess and secure your organisation with Tanium’s Software Bill of Materials (SBOM)
• Tanium Guardian is the perfect solution for organisations wanting alerts, insights, and remediation actions that leverage the real-time, seamless, and autonomous power of the Tanium XEM platform, enhancing the ability to respond quickly and effectively to critical and high-severity issues