Why Tanium is an Outperformer in GigaOm’s New Patch Management Report

Patch management is an essential prerequisite for continuous cyber risk mitigation. But it’s not getting any easier. That makes finding the right security partner an essential task for any IT operations leader. But this too is fraught with difficulty in a market saturated with vendors.

This is where independent market analysis can be invaluable. GigaOm’s new Radar for Patch Management Solutions report rates Tanium Patch “exceptional” for all market segments, deployment models, evaluation metrics, and patch management coverage areas across different operating systems. It should provide food for thought for any IT buyer.

Why patching matters

Patch management has always been an important part of cyber hygiene – a means for organizations to mitigate cyber risk by reducing the attack surface of open vulnerabilities. But as vulnerabilities like Log4Shell have illustrated, getting patching right has become both more critical and more challenging today.

Part of the challenge comes from the sheer number of CVEs being published every month. The past five years have seen a record number make their way into the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), including more than 20,000 last year. At the same time, endpoints are more distributed and heterogeneous than ever, thanks to investments in cloud infrastructure and the trend towards hybrid working.

The bottom line: threat actors have a range of intrusion vectors and a growing number of unmanaged endpoints to target. And they’re capable of doing so within hours of a new vulnerability being published, to support ransomware and other critical attacks. But security and ops teams are often hamstrung by organizational silos, patch overload and an inability to prioritize their efforts. Legacy tools can be slow — taking weeks or months to apply patches, and even then, often missing some endpoints.

Outperforming in every way

Tanium Patch offers a better way. Automated patching at speed and scale reduces cyber risk and enhances business resilience. Customers can patch hundreds of thousands of endpoints on a single Tanium instance, and hundreds of secondary relay, database or distribution servers. There are customized options to enable the delivery of groups of patches across the environment at specified times, and immediate, actionable feedback on any deployment failures which require remediation.

GigaOm found that Tanium is a patch management leader and outperformer. Its report declares that Tanium Patch offers outstanding focus and execution across virtually all key criteria: inventory, lifecycle management, testing, deployment, trusted scores, and patch priority. Other snippets from GigaOm’s independent analysis include:

• Customer-managed options are “a good fit for large enterprises that prefer control over the entire platform,” while “SMBs and MSPs are also a good fit for Tanium.”
• “Patch coverage includes almost any conceivable endpoint,” including full coverage of Windows, macOS, and Linux desktops and servers, as well as mobile and remote systems.
• “Its automation capabilities are excellent, allowing easy script creation, testing, and deployment.”
• Tanium offers “real-time data collection at an enterprise scale, giving security and IT operations teams access to accurate information on the state of endpoints.”

The result: Tanium takes a complex but critical function and makes things easy for IT operations and security teams — reducing enterprise risk exposure in a fast, scalable and highly effective way.

To read a full copy of GigaOm’s report on endpoint management, visit our website.