Changing the Way Organizations Think About Endpoint Security

The endpoint is where business happens. From cloud containers and virtual machines to remote laptops and office-based workstations, it’s the beating heart of the modern corporate IT environment. Yet an explosion in digital transformation in recent years has also made endpoint technologies a liability in many organizations, contributing to a rapidly expanding attack surface. These trends fuel a global endpoint security market predicted to exceed $31 billion by 2026. So, with all this spending, why do so many organizations still not feel any safer?

[Read also: What is endpoint security? Benefits, types, and best practices]

Unfortunately, most existing solutions fail to address the fundamental challenges of endpoint visibility and control that continue to drive up enterprise risk. Tanium CMO Steve Daheb sat down with Dave Gruber, Principal Analyst, ESG at Black Hat USA recently to discuss why.

A digital explosion

The endpoint explosion was fuelled first by pre-pandemic digital transformation. From financial services to healthcare, organizations turned to cloud infrastructure and applications, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and other innovations to create value for their customers. The trend only accelerated during the COVID crisis as organizations rushed to support work-from-home (WFH) and find new ways to reach consumers. Today, many of us work from anywhere, and the legacy endpoint estate has evolved to include OT sensors, virtual servers and cloud containers. But with the traditional network perimeter already a thing of the past, companies and their users are more exposed than ever.

Part of the challenge lies with the shortcomings of traditional endpoint management solutions and security tools. Especially in the cloud, new assets might appear with mind-boggling frequency. Security and operations teams need to know second-by-second where each of them is, who’s using them and what’s running on them. Then they need a way to remediate in a similarly agile way when problems are discovered.

The platform is back

Despite spending billions, organizations have largely been unable to tackle these challenges. Data breaches hit an all-time high in the U.S. last year. And ransomware compromise impacted nearly two-fifths (37%) of global firms, according to an IDC study from 2021. Something needs to change.

So, what’s the problem with most current tooling? First, it’s usually architected in such a way as to deliver stale, incomplete data from endpoints. It gets aggregated into a large database before being queried, meaning decision-making could happen hours or days after the request for information was first sent out. Exacerbating the problem are siloed teams: IT ops, security and risk and compliance may all be running their own point solutions, which can ultimately leave serious visibility and coverage gaps. The result? By the time team leaders have decided on a remediation tactic, the bad guys have already got what they wanted and moved on.

Organizations desperately need a single platform for their IT teams to converge around — one which delivers real-time visibility into the entire endpoint estate, and the ability to remediate with minimal clicks. In short, it’s time for something different.

The journey starts here

Tanium’s unique linear chain architecture means it communicates directly in real-time with lightweight agents on every endpoint and pulls data from those assets in seconds. It’s a fundamentally different approach to the rest of the market, which is why we’re able to deliver comprehensive endpoint visibility for enhanced decision-making. It’s about making the impossible possible, to solve a range of IT challenges — from patch and vulnerability management to threat hunting, risk and compliance management and sensitive data monitoring.

Converging all of this into a single platform means IT teams see everything and are empowered to rapidly fix any issues, all from the same console. That makes for more productive teams, and more effective and continuous cyber risk management.

Customers may start their Tanium journey in different ways. Some begin slowly with the endpoint visibility/asset discovery piece. Others working on green field deployments go all in from the start, because they want a common control plane, common set of data and common taxonomy to work across all their various internal organizations. But wherever the journey starts, the most important thing is to take that first step.

Want to experience how Tanium’s Converged Endpoint Management (XEM) solution can help keep your organization safe from cyber threats? Try Tanium today.