Introducing Tanium Automate: Easy-to-Create Orchestration and Automation at Scale

Many organizations today struggle with manual processes that limit IT and security execution. They struggle to keep up with a growing list of priorities and limited resources, which is further hindered by manual processes that take a significant amount of time and people to manage and run. These are often repetitive, but business critical operations that are ripe for automation.

With resources already stretched to the limit, it’s even more challenging to make the investments needed to automate even the most common tasks.

As a result, teams end up performing many critical and oft-repeated processes using manual and often error-prone procedures.

Meanwhile, industry research shows that organizations using automation report benefits such as cost reduction, increased productivity, systems availability and reliability, and greater performance.

Business consulting firm McKinsey reports that about half of the activities carried out by workers could benefit and be made more streamlined through automation, and for some 60 percent of occupations at least 30 percent of their activities are capable of being automated. That’s based on an analysis of more than 2000 work activities across more than 800 occupations.

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Why do organizations struggle to automate IT and cybersecurity processes?

Organizations face several primary challenges as they consider taking advantage of orchestration and automation technologies:

• Lack of controls and standardization can make automation risky, unreliable, and disruptive in dynamic IT environments, which limits when and where automation is used.
• Connecting workflows across multiple solutions is complex, error-prone, and slow due to different APIs, data, and protocols that must be used. This increases automation development time and costs.
• Standalone automation tools require skilled experts to create, scale, and maintain an automation library. Companies that undertake IT automation often find themselves constrained by a lack of in-house expertise and ultimately abandon or scale back their automation goals.

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Companies are desperately looking to scale IT and security execution with orchestration capabilities that address these challenges, so that they can automate complex and repeatable tasks, and execute them at scale in real time.

Point solutions in some cases offer automation capabilities. But these are incomplete solutions and force teams to kludge multiple tools to build automations that solve end-to-end use cases. This leads to fragile integration points, latency, and complexity.

And while general purpose orchestration and automation platforms exist in the market to help deliver end-to-end, cross-product orchestration and automation, they’ve not been able to achieve the potential of what’s possible in part because they lack an accurate and real time understanding of the state of endpoints. Plus, the cost and complexity of implementing such tools is high.

Introducing Tanium Automate: IT process orchestration at scale

To help organizations overcome these hurdles, Tanium is proud to introduce Tanium Automate, which is designed to make IT and Security teams more effective at scale with orchestration capabilities that automate complex tasks, make them repeatable, and execute them in real time.

Test drive Tanium Automate with this interactive demonstration

Automate is built into Tanium Core, the heart of our Converged Endpoint Management (XEM) platform and enables enterprises to automate complex tasks at speed and scale by replacing manual processes with easy-to-implement, no-code and low-code orchestration and automation. It delivers consistent and repeatable workflow execution in real time at any scale and is interoperable with third-party solutions.

In a private preview of Tanium Automate, leading global footwear and apparel company VF Corporation streamlined IT and security task management using real-time endpoint visibility and data with Tanium modules like Patch, Discover, and Deploy.

What used to be a fragmented multi-step process is now effortlessly managed within a single platform.

“With Tanium Automate, we are now able to instantly turn off individual services before patching, confirm they are ready, and then automatically patch — all through one user-friendly console,” notes David Anderson, VFC’s patch automation and vulnerability remediation lead. “Once the reboot takes place, we can script it to turn on those services, confirm they are on, and verify the process is done.”

Anderson and his team can now easily control specific services, ensure they are no longer running, and deploy patches with ease.

Easy-to-create playbooks

One of the key benefits of the platform is that it empowers users at all skill levels with intuitive no-code and low-code experiences to perform repeatable actions – even the most complex tasks. Although the solution’s focus is automation, it always keeps operators in the loop and gives them complete control and governance at each step.

With Tanium Automate, we are now able to instantly turn off individual services before patching, confirm they are ready, and then automatically patch — all through one user-friendly console.

Customers will be able to orchestrate and chain together a series of Tanium actions (for example, patching, application deployments, endpoint quarantines, starting and stopping services, or other actions that are supported across the platform) into logical, repeatable sequences, called playbooks.

These playbooks run automatically or with user interaction and oversight and can be targeted to specific endpoints based on dynamic criteria. They can be scheduled, triggered, or run on demand, and their execution and results can be monitored in real time. Users can create methodical and efficient task sequences, manage IT environments, and quickly respond to operations and security incidents.

Here are some playbook examples:

• Find all workstations with a specific licensed application installed that has not been used in the last 30 days. Then uninstall the software from all machines where it’s not being used.
• Onboarding new devices that require multiple steps, including but not limited to installing software applications, configuring services, changing the hostname, rebooting the device, etc.
• Mitigating emerging issue vulnerabilities that require multiple actions performed in sequence (for example, a configuration change or patch) to eliminate the potential for exploitation.

Over time, additional no-code and low-code actions will be added to support Tanium solution areas and modules. This will enhance Automate with more robust out-of-the-box and easy-to-use building blocks with which to create playbooks.

Tanium Automate is part of our foray into autonomous endpoint management (AEM), and it’s a fundamental pillar of our XEM platform.

Tanium Automate serves as another critical component in support of the AEM capabilities within the Tanium XEM platform. With the unique ability to combine the power of real-time endpoint visibility and data and turn it into real-time action, Tanium is the first to make AEM a reality.

Conclusion – Teams need speed and quality

For many organizations across a spectrum of industries, automation is a key to success in today’s business environment. Companies need speed, quality, and reliability to stay ahead of the competition.

But as we’ve seen, automation is not always easy to implement. And point solutions have not addressed the many challenges automation presents.

Tanium Automate addresses the challenges and enables enterprises to scale IT and security execution with easy-to-create automation powered by real-time data. The platform eliminates the complexity of automating across point solutions, with a converged endpoint management platform that delivers reliable and resilient automation.

Learn more about Tanium Automate or request a live product demo.

Take Tanium Automate for a test drive with this interactive demo.