Tanium Software Inventory & Usage: The Key to Accurate Software Management

In today’s dynamic and complex digital landscape, organizations often find themselves grappling with software management challenges. Traditional methods of tracking software usage and licenses fail to deliver when the tools discover only a portion of endpoints in an environment or when reports take hours to run. In these cases, they ultimately produce inaccurate historical data that compromises decision making.

Software is the IT asset that organizations said had the most difficulty maintaining a timely and accurate inventory.¹

The inability to take appropriate actions and continuously maintain accurate software inventory and usage leads to various challenges that lead to higher costs and security risks. IT could be unaware of unpatched software, faced with unexpected audit fees, or affected by unnecessary contract renegotiations. Unmanaged software is often a key source for breaches, and sometimes operators are already aware of types of software that add more risk. They need to be able to make rapid changes to vulnerable endpoints.

Environments also undergo major changes or transitions, such as mergers and acquisitions, which highly affect software costs and vulnerability risks. To address these challenges, operators need real-time data to help them accurately monitor software inventory and usage.

Tanium Software Inventory & Usage

Tanium Autonomous Endpoint Management’s Software Inventory & Usage (SIU) capabilities provide a single source of truth for software data, enabling organizations to gain real-time insights and make informed decisions by providing the following key capabilities that make data collection and analysis quicker and easier:

• Discover all running applications: Track inventory and usage of applications regardless of whether it was installed through traditional (e.g., Microsoft Software Installer files in Windows) or other means (e.g., files transferred from a USB drive, shared drive, or a downloads directory).
• Highly valuable Tanium SIU data
  • Automatic name normalization: Tanium SIU automatically normalizes vendor and product names to resolve common inconsistencies coming from vendors, preventing the need to manually regroup them.
  • Detailed and trustworthy data: Customize parameters to define usage levels for tracked products. For instance, you may want to increase what is considered a normal usage level (i.e., minutes on average per day) for costly and prioritized software. Dive deeper and see data for product versions, including installation dates, usage, and past versions on individual endpoints.

  

  • NEW live usage data: For each product, get real-time usage data from currently connected endpoints within seconds. This speed enables operators to more accurately investigate what application versions are deployed across the environment and their usage.

  

  • Multiple views of Tanium SIU: Extract, organize, and view data of tracked applications in reporting and dashboards. Plus, you can use completely natural human language queries in Tanium’s question bar to get answers to your Tanium SIU questions in seconds.

  

Use Tanium data for success

Tanium’s SIU provides accurate, real-time information on demand that’s easily accessed within Tanium or even through an integrated CMDB, helping address many IT and security teams’ operational challenges and situations, including:

• Cost savings: Tech budgets and unexpected fees are reduced through license reclamation, improved efficiency of software management and case investigation workflows, and ensuring compliance with internal and external audits.
• Risk mitigation: By taking control of inventory with quick investigation and actions, operators can reduce the security risks of unauthorized or vulnerable software.
• Accurate software management: Real-time data allows IT to quickly adapt and support evolving business needs, whether that’s a major expansion of the environment (e.g., M&A) or a change of endpoints.

Tanium helped BHG with over $125k of cost savings by deprecating software management tools and non-renewal of unused software.

Conclusion

Traditional software management tools struggle with outdated data, making cost and software management difficult. This often leads to over-licensing or under-licensing, resulting in unnecessary costs or audit risks.

[Read also: Why IT asset management and inventory systems are better together]

Tanium SIU provides organizations with real-time, detailed software inventory and usage data that enables them to effectively manage all of the software in their environment. This centralized, accurate information improves software management, enhances cost efficiency, and reduces IT risks.

To learn more about Tanium Software Inventory & Usage, read our latest whitepaper and watch this episode of Tanium Tech Talks.