Driving Towards IT Hygiene | Challenge #2: Visibility Gaps

Managing enterprise IT environments is becoming more and more complex. In this series, we’ll take a careful look at the challenges that have stemmed from this growing complexity. Furthermore, we will highlight how focusing on fundamental IT hygiene can help you overcome these challenges.

In this second installment of the blog series, we focus on the challenge of visibility gaps.

You can’t protect what you can’t see. Most IT professionals will agree with this statement. IT hygiene starts with a contextual, accurate, up-to-date inventory of your endpoints, including laptops, servers, VMs and cloud instances on your network. With this in mind, IT teams have acquired a host of tools – asset discovery solutions, SIEMs, CMDBs, etc. – in hopes of driving towards improved visibility. So why then, do we still find IT organizations suffering from significant visibility gaps?

It’s because IT teams are prevented from seeing the big picture when it comes to endpoint visibility. Each point product has its own view of the environment. Individual tools may offer data that is relatively complete, contextual, or timely. But when we look at this data in aggregate, visibility gaps start to form.

For example, you might get EDR telemetry up to the cloud every five minutes from all your systems, but not your unmanaged hosts. You may get vulnerability scan results once a week for PCI systems and once a month for workstations (that happen to be online at the time). Your asset discovery solution might scan for managed and unmanaged assets, but only in the datacenter and only once a day. And if you need a new set of data that you didn’t anticipate, outside the scope of your existing tooling’s hard-coded capabilities, there’s no easy way to get to it. Ultimately, stitching all this asynchronous data together to glean actionable insights becomes nearly impossible.

Unified Endpoint Management

As a result, we’ve found organizations typically underestimate their asset inventory by as much as 20%. One in five assets. At the scale of hundreds of thousands of endpoints, this poses significant risk!

IT organizations are well aware of their visibility gaps, and their most frequent challenges all relate to data quality and visibility, including:

• Stitching together data across IT systems to generate actionable insights
• Identifying new/unmanaged assets that previously unknown
• Getting up-to-the minute data on the environment

So what’s the solution to endpoint visibility gaps? How can IT teams clear the way and gather endpoint data that allows them to see the bigger picture?

At Tanium we approach this challenge with a unified endpoint management platform. One that synchronizes endpoint telemetry across all those physical and virtual endpoints on your network. Armed with a single authoritative source of endpoint data, IT organizations can start to resolve their most glaring visibility gaps with confidence.

Watch for the next installment of the Tanium IT Hygiene Blog Series. In the meantime, to learn more about how Tanium can help your organization drive improved IT hygiene:

• Download the IT Hygiene Solution Brief
• Watch the Tanium demo
• Contact us today for more information.

Interested in seeing Tanium in action? Schedule a one-to-one demo or attend our weekly webinar. Talk to our Tanium experts at our upcoming events.