Asset Discovery and Inventory: 9 Ways Tanium Makes it Fast, Complete, and Accurate

Asset discovery and inventory — or the process of maintaining a complete, accurate, and up-to-date inventory of your IT assets — is more challenging than ever before. Even with proper asset discovery tools, you are managing an environment with an enormous volume of globally distributed assets with complex dependencies — each of which can either fail and lead to performance loss or be compromised and result in an enterprise-wide security incident.

Unfortunately, most CIOs struggle to identify all of the assets they have and to keep track of the current state of those assets. They invest heavily in dozens of tools to complete discovery and inventory, and yet they still:

• Can’t answer fundamental questions about their environment.
• Lack a single source of truth to make informed decisions.
• Lack visibility and control over their assets.

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Tanium gives you a modern endpoint tool that can give you accurate, complete, and up-to-date data about all of the assets in your estate in minutes — not hours, days, or weeks. And in this blog, we’ll explore the nine ways you can use Tanium to improve your asset discovery and inventory processes.

Let’s dig in.

The top 9 ways that Tanium improves asset discovery and inventory

When you perform asset discovery and inventory with Tanium, you will:

1. Discover every endpoint in your environment and build a complete inventory in minutes

With traditional tools, CIOs often require days or weeks to scan their environment and ultimately collect endpoint data that is often stale, inaccurate, and incomplete.

As a result, most CIOs create an asset inventory that misses many endpoints and cannot answer essential questions about what assets are in their environment and what those assets are doing.

With Tanium, you will scan your entire environment in minutes and create a complete inventory that includes all of your assets — even endpoints that “hide” from traditional tools — and context for every asset discovered.

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2. Continuously discover and categorize new devices, and automatically bring them under management

With traditional tools, CIOs can only perform periodic scans of their environment for fear of overloading their network and causing outages.

As a result, CIOs can go days, weeks, or even months without learning what new endpoints have recently entered their environment and without bringing those endpoints under control.

With Tanium, you will automatically detect unknown and unmanaged endpoints in your environment, bring them into your inventory and under your management, and store the last known state of offline assets.

3. Increase the value of your CMDB, SIEM, ITSM, and other third-party tools

With traditional tools, CIOs are forced to populate their third-party tools — like their CMDB, SIEM, or ITSM — with scattered, siloed, and contradictory sources of asset data.

As a result, most CIOs struggle to perform simple workflows with their third-party tools, such as running consistent reports, allowing end-user self-service features, or driving automation initiatives.

With Tanium, you will easily populate your third-party tools with a single source of accurate and complete asset data through out-of-the-box integrations with many popular tools, like Microsoft Sentinel and ServiceNow.

4. Collect complete, accurate, up-to-date hardware, software, and asset data

With traditional tools, CIOs can only scan for the software, hardware, and assets that were provisioned by IT or that they otherwise think might be in their environment.

As a result, many CIOs have environments that are filled with unknown and unmanaged shadow assets — each of which introduces new operational and security risk into the organization.

With Tanium, you scan and categorize your entire environment in minutes, create a complete list of every piece of software and hardware in your environment, and eliminate the risks created by shadow IT.

5. Intelligently reclaim and redistribute assets to avoid unnecessary hardware and software costs

With traditional tools, CIOs lack a complete and accurate picture of how many hardware and software assets they have and how those assets are actually being used.

As a result, many CIOs overspend on redundant infrastructure and on software licenses that are not being used sufficiently by their employees.

With Tanium, identify redundant infrastructure that you can eliminate, and collect real-time software usage data to identify which licenses you can reclaim or redistribute.

6. Rapidly generate accurate reports from a single source of truth

With traditional tools, CIOs must integrate, centralize, and normalize asset data from dozens of complex point solutions every time they want to run a simple report on the state of their endpoints.

As a result, CIOs are forced to spend a lot of time and effort every time they need to answer a basic question about their environment — and cannot guarantee their data is processed properly and that their answer is accurate.

With Tanium, you will automatically centralize and normalize data from all of your assets into a single source of truth, and run ad-hoc reports in just a few clicks to answer any question you or your stakeholders have.

7. Unify your IT operations, security, and risk teams under a shared understanding of your environment

With traditional tools, IT operations, security, and risk teams often collect their own data and create their own picture of the asset environment.

As a result, these teams often disagree on the current state of the environment, prioritize different improvement initiatives, and experience day-to-day friction.

With Tanium, your teams can work from a single, accurate, and timely picture of your environment, helping you make confident decisions that everyone agrees upon.

8. Reduce disruptions during major changes like cloud migrations

With traditional tools, CIOs must perform major data center changes — like cloud migrations — without an accurate, up-to-date system of record for all of the assets they are moving.

As a result, major changes are often slow and inefficient and disrupt normal business operations as assets move from one environment into another.

With Tanium, you will maintain an accurate system of record for all assets at all times and monitor major changes and the state of all assets in real-time, even as they migrate.

9. Perform end-to-end asset discovery and inventory in one platform

With traditional tools, discovering and inventorying assets is a sprawling and scattered project that combines multiple isolated activities performed by multiple isolated tools and teams.

With Tanium, you will turn asset discovery and inventory into a single, unified solution that can answer fundamental questions about what’s going on with your hardware, software, or assets — accurately, at any scale, in seconds.

In sum, Tanium gives you every critical workflow and piece of real-time data that you need to discover all of your endpoints, reduce your risk, and improve the performance of your diverse, distributed, and dynamic environment.

Bring Tanium to your organization

The difference is clear.

You can’t perform effective asset discovery and inventory across your modern endpoint environment with traditional tools. But with Tanium, you will make it fast, simple, and easy — no matter how large and complex your environment is.

Learn more about Tanium’s asset discovery and inventory solution and request a demo.