It’s 2019, Not 1997. Time to Modernize Your IT Operations.

I remember my first cell phone. It was chunky and weighed a lot, like a car battery with rounded edges that I could somehow use to talk to people. It didn’t really fit in my backpack, let alone my pocket. But, hey, this was the 90s – grunge, big cell phones, Seinfeld – and it was the best we could hope for. You know what I mean.

We’ve evolved since then, and so have our tastes. A lot of technology evolved, too, but if you take a look at a lot of endpoint management tools…well, they look like the 90s. Your legacy endpoint management tools were the hot new thing back then, but these days, are costly, slow, time-consuming and inaccurate. It’s 2019, not 1997.

We’re headed into the new year with a lot of churn in the market, especially among some of those very 90s vendors changing ownership (again), so consider this your opportunity: there’s never been a better time to leave outdated management tools behind and upgrade to a platform built within and for this century.

To evaluate whether your legacy platform is delivering the way it needs to – that is, setting you up for success as a resilient business – here are some questions to ask:

1. Isn’t there a better way to architect a management platform?

You bet there is. Legacy management tools rely on a hub-and-spoke architecture for sharing data, which, among other drawbacks, is a hassle for your team to manage and takes a heavy toll on WAN connections, weighing them down and slowing the time in which you receive actionable data. Don’t settle for 80-95% patch compliance and 30, 60, or even 90 day patching cycles. You need a platform that rethinks the entire topology.

2. Are we seeing every endpoint on our network? No, really, everything?

You can’t manage what you can’t see, and you can’t see clearly if the way your tools perform discovery of those endpoints is lacking. When working with new Tanium customers and scanning their environments, we often find a significant percentage – sometimes as much as 35% – of endpoints that aren’t managed or even known about.

3. Can we act on what we’re seeing, at the level we need?

Seeing what’s in an environment comes first, and then we must be able to take fast action using the real-time insights we’re provided. Security threats are growing in volume and sophistication and we have to be able to react as fast as attackers can move.

4. How much time could the team get back if we dramatically improved our patching workflows?

Operators spend days, weeks and months configuring software update groups, software update lists and individual deployments – and the underlying (and unnecessary) infrastructure to support all of that – because legacy tools won’t help them do it efficiently. We’re long past the point where spending 30, 60 or even 90 days to achieve less-than-100% patch compliance is acceptable. It isn’t.

5. Are we getting the best user experience for our investment?

In 2019, insist on one, clean user interface for managing your environment. Tanium offers cross-platform visibility and control over all your endpoints – on-premise, remote and cloud-based – from a single console.

The Tanium platform transforms the way you work, helping you achieve true business resilience. Start a new conversation and get in touch with our team today.

For more about modernizing IT operations, read our ongoing blog series on ops modernization:

• It’s Time to Modernize IT Operations. Business Resilience Depends on It
• IT Operations Starts with Visibility to All Devices
• IT Operations Success Requires Knowing Your Assets
• Just Patch Your Systems. Please.

Pete Constantine

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.

About the Author:Pete Constantine leads product management of the IT Operations portfolio at Tanium, where his focus and passion is shaping new product modules and bringing them to market. Pete has held numerous technical positions in IT Operations, virtualization, and Systems Management.