Professional Services Firm Manages Newly Acquired Endpoints With Tanium
By acquiring other companies, a professional-services firm has grown its business — and its number of endpoints. With Tanium, the company now keeps these devices visible, more secure and managed.
Acquiring other companies may be one of the fastest ways to grow a business, but it’s not necessarily the easiest. Just ask a global consulting firm that has recently acquired several other firms.
All that growth has also brought about a sharp increase in the number of endpoints the company must manage. Currently, those endpoints number more than 1,000, and most of them are not in the company’s headquarters location. Nearly all the company’s employees work remotely, and so do the company’s endpoint devices.
While that global expansion has been important, all those endpoints have also increased the company’s vulnerability to cyberattacks, malicious code and other threats. This endpoint growth has also added to the company’s workload for patch management, updates and deployments of third-party software, and endpoint vulnerability reporting. Looking ahead, the company continues to grow, and it would like the ability to deploy endpoint management solutions with both speed and ease.
On top of that, the company also maintains a cloud-first strategy, meaning it aims to have no servers on-premises and only minimal levels of service management. That strategy also means the company seeks visibility into its endpoints at the lowest possible cost.
Those requirements soon led the company to Tanium.
Implementing a cloud-first strategy
Ultimately, the company implemented six Tanium modules: Asset for detecting and inventorying endpoint assets; Comply for detecting and reporting vulnerabilities; Core for day-to-day administrative duties; Deploy to help configure a self-service portal for deploying and updating software; Patch for keeping Windows instances up to date and secure; and Discover for gaining visibility into endpoint devices, regardless of their location and whether they are managed or unmanaged.
One aspect of Tanium that the company especially appreciated was the company’s cloud-first strategy, which matched its own approach to cloud. In fact, if Tanium had offered an on-premises solution only, the company probably would not have even been considered. That’s how important this was.
The company simply had to have Tanium as a Service (TaaS), a cloud-based service that delivers the full functionality of the Tanium platform. TaaS is a fully managed service that provides the infrastructure and back-end management the company needs, allowing admins to focus on how they use the modules. Because TaaS is a cloud-based service running off Amazon Web Services (AWS), it requires zero customer infrastructure.
Key benefits of Tanium
Tanium implemented a proof-of-concept solution for the company in 2020. The work went so well, a full solution was implemented just a few months later. Now, the customer is enjoying several important benefits.
These include:
Greater visibility into under-managed assets: Software licenses and servers (both physical and virtual) have been reclaimed and brought under management.
Greater people and process efficiencies: Automation enables reduced labor costs for activities including incident response, patch management and vulnerability scanning.
Tool management: Several tools have been either enhanced or displaced for activities including patching, endpoint security, vulnerability scanning and gathering information.
Disruption avoidance and recovery: Risk can be reduced by lowering the frequency, duration and severity of security incidents. When data breaches or business-disrupting outages do occur, the company can now recover with greater speed.
Tanium has also helped the company shorten the time needed to compile reports for both cloud deployments and third-party application patching. The company expects these time savings will make important contributions to its return on investment.
Making acquisitions is a key to the company’s growth. And one key to making those acquisitions successful is managing new endpoint devices with the help of Tanium.
Find out why other customers partner with Tanium to manage and secure their endpoints.
