Why We CONVERGE

CONVERGE kickoff

Today we kick off CONVERGE, our inaugural conference in San Francisco. We’re gathering together our customers, team, partners, and technical experts to learn from each other and share how they are readying themselves for the challenges of today and tomorrow.

And of course, we wouldn’t invite this many people without some exciting news to share.

So why now? The reason we’re coming together, and a guiding principle for everything thing we build, is simple: we must. It’s our responsibility. One of the biggest threats facing businesses and governments today are massive data breaches and service outages. We’ve seen time and time again that failure to defend and properly manage networks has catastrophic effects to organizations and the public who depend upon them. Just this Friday, global commerce and communication was stymied as PayPal, Twitter, GitHub, CNN, Box, and many others disappeared from the internet as one of their DNS hosts was hit by massive DDoS attacks. The layers of inefficient point tools on top of antiquated technology we’ve used to keep us “safe” and stable have proven ineffective for our modern networks, which are growing rapidly by the day.

IT budgets are also on the rise in an effort to match what’s at stake — billions of dollars in lost revenue, fines, and consumer trust — resulting in a “gold rush” of start-ups and incumbents flooding the market with supposed solutions. But most companies are peddling snake-oil, which has disillusioned IT practitioners and led to a lack of trust within the industry. This frustration with the status quo is one of the many reasons we founded Tanium.

A stunning lack of cyber hygiene is one of the core reasons our data is not safe in 2016, yet it’s not being talked about at the scale it requires. While incumbent vendors re-package old solutions with sleek marketing in service of a lucrative renewal, we start with the basics. When Tanium first meets with customers, we find an average of 12% – 20% more endpoints than were previously known, 60% of endpoints missing critical patches, and 75% missing patches to Adobe Flash and/or Oracle Java. Failing at the basics is a company’s biggest problem 99.9% of the time. Literally. 99.9% of attacks exploited are from vulnerabilities that had been identified for more than a year, some of them as far back as 1999.

In our short four years out of stealth, Tanium has played a critical role in helping some of the most important organizations in the world rethink the way they see, understand, and manage every machine on their networks, and prevent innumerable breaches in the process. Through our modular platform, we’ve also enabled these organizations to transform how they interact with and rely on an interface akin to that of Google, Facebook, and other consumer Internet giants. Tanium is deployed at many of the world’s largest organizations, including each of the top 10 U.S. banks and 4 of the top 10 retailers, and our customers are the inspiration for every module we deliver — an average of one per quarter since 2014. I’m thrilled to share that the market continues to respond. We’re growing in both depth and breadth, with financial services clients for example growing 2x life-to-date.

Continued expansion

We’ve expanded the platform in ways not previously commercially available: having seen Tanium in use in hundreds of deployments, we’ve realized that one of the real issues facing these organizations is the inability for non-technical execs and board members to have real-time understanding of the vulnerability and health of the business. That’s why we’re proud to announce on stage this week an important extension of the platform that will, for the first time, provide a way for people across an organization to have real-time visibility into all of the activity that happens across its devices and computers (endpoints). With the new Trends module, Tanium users can easily visualize, understand, and communicate the true state of their security and operations health.

Trends is yet another product extension directly resulting from conversations with our customers about their needs, an analytical experience specifically designed for Tanium data and customers. Tanium Trends is specifically built to not only visualize the powerful effects that Tanium has on networks, but also find and discover insights and take action within the Tanium Core Platform. Before Trends, Tanium data was presented in data tables; Trends not only unlocks the ability to visualize just how powerful Tanium is at scale, but also reduces the time between analysis, insight, and taking action. In addition, we’re unveiling a host of updates that evolve our offerings and platform with the needs of new and existing customers, described below.

Cybersecurity and beyond

Tanium goes way beyond cybersecurity: we provide customers like Aon with a single pane of glass of visibility across its operations tools and platforms. As it continues to grow through M&A, Aon has needed to consolidate its tools and platforms, all while moving away from traditional data centers and leveraging the cloud for greater efficiency and cost savings.

Tanium has helped homogenize and consolidate tool sets and provided much-needed uniformity and visibility throughout the network, globally. And we’re growing our team accordingly. Since February, Tanium is now up to 450 employees from 340, and we look forward to sharing another phenomenal year of financial results with you at fiscal year-end in February.

So, what’s new?

We’ll be making several more announcements from the CONVERGE stage this week, including:

• Tanium Labs: A catalog of TAM-provided extensions to enable new use cases and productivity for Tanium users. In Tanium Core Platform Version 7, customers now have access to this innovation hub and can start leveraging content for everything from Win10 migration to asset inventory to Python support.
• Core Platform Updates:
  • Fine-grained Role Based Access Control (RBAC) provides Tanium access to more users and teams in a controlled way via advanced role segmentation.
  • Tanium Connect now provides more awareness to the size and scope of data flowing to external systems and enhanced operator insight into scheduled connections.
• Product Module Updates:
  • Tanium Comply Vulnerability Assessment: Provides complete and actionable enterprise-wide scans for software vulnerabilities based on standards-based data sources like the CIS Oval Repository.
  • Tanium Protect Microsoft AppLocker support: Adds basic application whitelisting with allowed exceptions by file hash or path through Microsoft AppLocker.

Whereas it’s apparent that Tanium has already made an indelible imprint on our industry, we are just getting started. Our goal is to continue keeping our unprecedented customer renewal rates by serving our customers’ needs better than any company in our industry has ever done before. We will continue to build new capabilities into the platform that will upend the industry and replace ineffective tools. Most of today’s essential companies started in one space, but grew to create their own category. There is no limit on where we’ll go: our ambition is to be the next big enterprise tech company. 2017 will be a banner year for Tanium – the best is yet to come!

Stay tuned to the blog for daily CONVERGE updates, and follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to get late-breaking updates from the stage.

About the Author: Orion Hindawi co-founded Tanium in 2007 and serves as its Chief Executive Officer. Orion leads product strategy and development of the Tanium Platform, in addition to all customer-facing technical operations and management functions. A technology visionary and accomplished inventor, Orion has led the development of enterprise-scale endpoint security and management platforms for the past 18 years at BigFix, Inc. (acquired by IBM in 2010) and Tanium, in addition to holding multiple software patents in the areas of network communications and systems management. Orion works closely with Tanium customers on a daily basis in the pursuit of inventing new approaches for solving the significant challenges IT departments face securing and managing large, global enterprise environments. Orion also serves on the Tanium Board of Directors.