Tanium for Managed Service Providers: Gain Visibility and Control While Reducing Cost and Delivering on SLAs

COVID-19 is upending long-established norms and ushering in a new era of flexible working: the work-from-anywhere era. This offers Managed Service Providers (MSPs) some valuable opportunities: to meet new customer demands for more visibility and control of distributed corporate endpoints and step up to fill the gap where customers have been forced to reduce in-house IT roles. But they are continually challenged by cost, complexity and the administrative burden of managing multiple point solutions.

Tanium offers an answer, with a new MSP partner program that offers enterprise-class platform capabilities for the mid-enterprise market space: a simple, cost-effective and powerful solution that’s easy to deploy, manage and monetise.

A new choice

Tanium architected our unified endpoint management and security platform to solve the IT challenges of some of the largest and most demanding enterprises and government agencies. But that also means these comprehensive solutions have not traditionally been financially viable for customers with under 15,000 endpoints.

However, for MSPs there’s a distinct advantage. By investing in the Tanium platform they can deliver a cost-effective service package “as a service” to customers, enabling them to benefit from industry-leading:

• Asset discovery and inventory
• Patch management
• Software management
• Performance monitoring
• Endpoint detection and response
• Vulnerability and configuration management
• Endpoint protection

Tanium’s unique architecture provides speed, visibility and control at scale – providing your team with insight into your customers’ IT assets in near real time – offering the ability to remediate problems quickly. It’s a shortcut to reducing IT complexity, improving efficiency and resilience, and bringing together siloed IT operations and security teams around a single source of truth.

What’s in it for MSPs?

This offers two main benefits from an MSP perspective:

1. Enterprise-class capabilities for mid-enterprise customers

Introducing Tanium provides immediate value for mid-enterprise customers and insight for the MSPs managing their security.

Its architecture works extremely well in highly distributed situations, shining a light on corporate assets, wherever they are, and enabling patching and management of those endpoints without using VPNs. Think of it as “double-value” insurance: it will help reduce the chances of customer data breaches and help protect the MSP from breaching any SLAs they might have in place with those customers.

2. Cost reductions via a unified platform for endpoint management and security

Most MSPs sell a range of point solutions in order to provide a comprehensive service to their customers. One provider we spoke to manages over 40 separate products. However, the total cost of ownership associated with this is prohibitively high, in terms of licenses and continual upgrades, in-house staff training and management overheads. Interoperability between solutions is often poor, potentially leading to gaps in protection or yet more hands-on work for the MSP.

The Tanium Platform offers a wide range of endpoint management and security capabilities which can be purchased module by module. Modules can be activated quickly, minimising time-to-value, as no additional Tanium servers or agents are required. Tanium’s speed, scalability and integrated modules deliver better and faster outcomes than a patchwork of “point products” requiring dozens-to-hundreds of servers.

A new opportunity for a new normal

The current pandemic will pass, but the “new normal” of flexible working will stay. At our recent EMEA Partner Summit UNITE2020, Forrester senior analyst, Paul McKay shared that the pandemic will accelerate business migration to the cloud and demand for security monitoring and control capabilities, as well as increasing firms’ reliance on MSPs as IT budgets stagnate. Paul McKay’s presentation can be found here.

There are therefore huge opportunities for the MSP market here. But there are also persistent challenges in dealing with the high costs and management burden associated with multiple point products. Tanium offers a new approach.

Backed by a new Tanium Partner Advantage program, we’re reaching out to MSPs with a dedicated support team across Europe and a 100% commitment to building a new ecosystem of expert partners in this space.

Interested in seeing Tanium in action? Schedule a one-to-one demo or talk to our Tanium experts at our upcoming events.