Why Tanium is a Leader in GigaOm’s New Patch Management Report for 2024

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 for 2024 rated Tanium Patch as “superior” and “exceptional” for the key capabilities it considers the primary criteria organizations must use when evaluating a patch management solution: agent/agentless architecture, inventory, patch lifecycle management, patch testing, patch deployment, patch prioritization, third-party or in-house applications, and trusted source repositories, with Tanium receiving the highest average score (4.9) of the 27 vendors included. Tanium Patch also received high ratings for other capabilities measured in the report, including emerging features around AI and business criteria like scalability and performance.

The 2024 report also determined that Tanium Patch is able to serve all market segments (small-to-medium businesses (SMBs), large enterprises, and managed service providers (MSPs)) and deployment models (software as a service (SaaS), self-managed, and hybrid/multi-cloud solutions).

But this isn’t the first time we’ve received this recognition: Tanium Patch was included in the 2023 and 2022 GigaOm Radar Report for Patch Management Solutions for our patch capabilities, which were rated as “exceptional, with outstanding focus and execution” in all market segments, deployment models, evaluation metrics, and patch management coverage areas across different operating systems — 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. However, as vulnerabilities like the malicious backdoor in the open-source XZ Utils tool that posed a threat to some Linux systems (CVE-2024-3094) 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. Compared to 2023, there’s been a ~27% increase so far this year in the number of CVEs published, according to the NIST National Vulnerability Database. 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 is that threat actors have a range of intrusion vectors and a growing number of unmanaged endpoints to target, and they’re doing so faster than ever before. In many cases, they’re capable of exploiting a new vulnerability before it’s even disclosed or patches are released.

Additionally, the challenges of addressing vulnerabilities before threat actors can be made more complex as security and ops teams are often constrained by organizational silos, patch overload, and an inability to prioritize their efforts. Legacy tools can also 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 that require remediation.

In recognition of our our platform catering to the needs of large enterprises with complex IT environments and our focus on security and compliance, GigaOm positioned Tanium as a Leader and Fast Mover in the Maturity/Platform Play quadrant of its 2024 Patch Management Radar chart.

To achieve Leader status, vendors need to demonstrate not only a mature and stable product but also a comprehensive platform approach that addresses a wide range of patching needs across diverse environments.

The GigaOm report declares that Tanium Patch stands out because of our unique architecture and comprehensive features, including our linear chain architecture that offers real-time visibility and control over endpoints, enabling rapid patch deployment and remediation with minimal overhead. The platform’s real-time data supports AI and machine learning, while inventory management ensures accurate, up-to-date information on hardware, software, and patch status, streamlining patching processes.

Tanium Patch also shines due to our patch lifecycle management with automated workflows, customizable policies, and seamless integration with vulnerability management for a holistic security approach. Our risk-based patch prioritization, using threat intelligence and customizable rules, helps organizations address critical vulnerabilities quickly.

GigaOm also found that our extensive platform and application support covers various operating systems, third-party applications, IoT devices, virtual machines, containers, and cloud-based infrastructure, making it a versatile solution for complex IT environments.

Other notable use cases of Tanium Patch highlighted in GigaOm’s independent analysis:

• Enterprise patch management is effective for “managing and securing a large number of endpoints across diverse operating systems and applications.”
• Vulnerability management and remediation involve “proactively identifying, assessing, and remediating vulnerabilities across the entire IT infrastructure.”
• Compliance management means “demonstrating compliance with patch management policies and security standards in regulated industries.”
• Automation is achieved by “using the Tanium Automate no/low-code workflow builder across various functionalities of the Tanium platform, such as server cluster patching.”

The result: Tanium takes on a critical role in making things easier for IT operations and security teams by reducing enterprise risk exposure in a fast, scalable, and highly effective way.

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Read a full copy of GigaOm’s report on patch management.