Introducing Tanium Asset

Announced today at Tanium CONVERGE17, Tanium Asset gives IT operations and asset managers an up-to-date picture of their endpoints and the software that is on them so they always have an accurate view of what is in their environment.

The first observation many customers make after deploying Tanium is about how easy it is to get full visibility into their endpoint environment. For most, it’s the first time they’ve had this view and level of control. The ability to see everything and do anything across their endpoints suddenly changes the way they approach IT operations – from how they solve basic problems around patching to how effectively they respond to security threats.

Organizations that use a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to manage their endpoints want that CMDB to be the “single source of truth” for keeping track of software, hardware, network devices and the relationships between them. However, the challenge of keeping a clean CMDB is a classic “garbage in, garbage out” issue: The sources that feed the CMDB – such as network discovery, monitoring and endpoint protection tools – are varied and updated at different times, leading to inaccurate and out-of-date information getting into the CMDB. Add to this the realities of modern computing environments – in which devices come and go from the network, employees bring their own devices to work and applications are moving to varied on- and off-premises cloud environments – and it’s not hard to understand why current discovery and inventory tools struggle to keep up.

And yet, without an accurate source of truth about your enterprise, you end up paying too much for software licenses, taking too much time to prepare for audits and having difficulty finding and responding to threats – since you can’t protect what you can’t see. Of course, generally speaking, it’s important to know your environment better than your attackers do.

Tanium Asset: An up-to-date picture of your endpoints

Tanium Asset reduces this confusion. Announced today at Tanium CONVERGE17, Tanium Asset gives IT operations and asset managers an up-to-date picture of their endpoints and the software that is on them so they have an accurate view of what is in their environment. They can then use the information to enrich the CMDB so they have confidence that the data is accurate and actionable. Tanium Asset brings inventory and reporting functionality to Tanium customers using the existing Tanium agent, extending the value of the Tanium platform without adding overhead on the endpoint.

We are partnering with CMDB vendors to offer their customers a simple way to connect the endpoint data they get from Tanium with other data they receive from their CMDB. This will provide visibility and reporting with data that is comprehensive and accurate. In the coming months we’ll announce the availability of various integrations with asset management systems.

During the testing phase of this project, customers told us that Tanium Asset reports have the potential to significantly reduce the time it takes to compile reports for audits and other inventory-heavy activities. One customer even thought that the functionality of Tanium Asset would have eliminated the need for them to have a custom reporting engine.

Customers will benefit from the accuracy, insight and efficiency provided by Tanium Asset so they can get the most out of their existing CMDB and ultimately make the right decisions about asset utilization – all from the same solution they are already using for security hygiene and threat response.

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About the Author: Joe Lea is head of product management at Tanium, where his focus and passion is shaping new product modules and bringing them to market. Joe has held numerous technical and product positions as well as executive management roles during his career. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Science which has informed his perspective on technology and led to 10 patents for user experience innovations. When he’s not busy at Tanium or spending time with family, he speaks about his experience competing in some of the world’s most grueling 100 mile mountain ultra-marathons, which, as it turns out, are not as different from his day job as you might expect.