Tanium XEM Platform Protects Nearly 100,000 Endpoints to Help the States of Arizona, Hawaii and the City of Phoenix Safeguard Their Citizens Against Growing Cyber Attacks

KIRKLAND, Wash., July 31, 2024 – Tanium, the industry’s leading provider of Converged Endpoint Management (XEM), today announced significant momentum in supporting its public sector customers as technology leaders further commit to improving their cyber resilience. Tanium’s state and local government sector secures nearly 100,000 endpoints in the State of Arizona, State of Hawaii, and City of Phoenix. 

“This is an incredible milestone and a testament to the hard work all of these organizations are accomplishing to provide secure digital services to their citizens,” said Jennifer Axt, senior vice president for U.S. State and Local Government and Education, Tanium. “We’re seeing this same level of momentum happen across the U.S. as more and more IT leaders increase their security and operations IT investments. Tanium is proud to play an essential role in supporting in their continued success.”

Tanium has seen its state and local government and education business experience remarkable growth as public sector organizations using Tanium continue to prioritize their IT infrastructures to safeguard citizen data from growing cyber threats. The impact of these investments comes at a crucial time as state and local governments face a 148% increase in malware attacks and 51% increase in ransomware incidents, according to data from the Center for Internet Security (CIS). Moreover, CIS reports breaches and other endpoint security service compromises have risen by 313% while non-malware intrusions have grown by 37%.

“Cybersecurity is a challenge for smaller state and local governments, with limited budgets and often a lack of resources to keep their systems and data safe,” says Chris Cruz, chief information officer, public sector, Tanium. “These public sector offices are easy targets for attacks from powerful, advanced cyber criminals and enemy countries. Tanium’s XEM platform enables these governments to manage their endpoints in one platform, enhancing the ability to safeguard the data of both residents and visitors alike.”

Using the Tanium XEM platform across cities, counties, and school districts, these organizations can consolidate siloed, point solutions and leveraged cost savings to both upgrade IT infrastructure capabilities and reduce risk through real-time visibility and collaboration. Tanium’s automated endpoint management (AEM) capabilities enable these organizations to cut down on patching time, decreasing the vulnerabilities otherwise prone to cyber and ransomware attacks.

City of Phoenix

Now the fifth-largest city in the United States, Phoenix has drastically grown its population from less than a million people in 1990 to almost 1.7 million today, making it a bigger target for cybercrime. Before Tanium, the City of Phoenix used four different tools and old hardware and software, which often made it difficult to locate or recognize systems. To keep devices safe, the Phoenix cybersecurity group increased its force from a small team of four people just five years ago to twenty today, immensely improving its IT infrastructure capabilities.  

After implementing the award-winning Tanium XEM platform for its patching capabilities, the city was able to: 

• Cut down patching time by a remarkable 75%.  

• Reclaim asset discovery and management and software license reclamation resulted in more effective collaboration among the city’s departments and a decrease in expenses. 

• Demolish silos and enable collaboration among 14,000 employees using over 20,000 endpoint devices. 

“You have to operate with the mindset that someday, we’ll have an incident, breach, or compromise of some kind. It’s inevitable,” says Shannon Lawson, chief information security officer, City of Phoenix. “We want to make sure we’re in a good position, that we’re not negligent with the data, and that we’re protecting the information of our citizens and employees.”

State of Arizona

Almost six years ago, Arizona adopted a whole-of-state strategy to provide adequate cybersecurity protection for its smaller counties, cities, and districts that might lack the resources to afford it, run by a small team of just eight. This approach, which some other U.S. states have also enacted, establishes a common security standard for the entire state and then maintains that standard by educating all state employees on security awareness. 

With the Tanium XEM platform, the State of Arizona has: 

• Patched over 40,000 vulnerabilities across systems in cities, counties, school districts in the past six months alone.

• Discovered its Navajo County IT department endpoints numbered closer to 1,000 than the 700 devices previously thought.   

• Identified software being run on some 20,000 endpoints, determined if updates were needed, and then applied those updates as needed. 

“If one of our cities or school districts were taken offline by a ransomware attack, they wouldn’t be able to provide their services. In fact, they’d cease to exist,” says Ryan Murray, interim chief information security officer, State of Arizona. “In the last six months alone, we’ve used Tanium to patch over 40,000 vulnerabilities across our local government entities. These are local school districts and cities that were literally trying to patch these things manually.”

State of Hawaii

The State of Hawaii is among the most vulnerable to cyberattacks in the United States, identifying the need to address and rapidly respond to IT vulnerabilities across the state’s diverse and distributed attack surface. The Office of Enterprise Technology Services (ETS) provides IT governance over the executive branch including emergency management services, health and human services, labor industrial relations, taxation, and land and natural resources, and needed more efficient workstreams to enable cross-functional collaboration. ETS challenged the notion of “this is the way we have always done it” to pursue a more efficient way to improve the state’s cybersecurity by investing in solutions to do the job, including the Tanium XEM platform, to provide full visibility and control of its endpoints. 

Additional highlights of the State of Hawaii success story include: 

• In just nine months, Tanium was deployed on 8,200 endpoints across 26 of Hawaii’s government agencies.  

• The State of Hawaii project is among the first in the United States to show a standardized, comprehensive, simple risk score for each department. 

“Leveraging Tanium as a solution for us has sped up our ability to make decisions because we have stronger visibility and an evolving control of our environment,” says Vince Hoang, chief information security officer, State of Hawaii. “Seeing my staff work with the Tanium staff on nearly a day-to-day basis has been transformational. It’s not very often we have vendors, by design, who are tied in so closely to us to help move a program forward.”

To learn more about how SLED customers are improving security while saving costs using Tanium’s XEM platform, visit: https://www.tanium.com/resources/tanium-for-state-local-government-solution-brief/.

About Tanium
Tanium delivers the industry’s only true real-time cloud-based endpoint management and security offering. Its converged endpoint management (XEM) platform is real-time, seamless, and autonomous, allowing security-conscious organizations to break down silos between IT and Security operations that results in reduced complexity, cost, and risk. Securing more than 32M endpoints around the world, Tanium’s customers include more than 40% of the Fortune 100, 7 of the top 10 U.S. retailers, 8 of the top 10 U.S. commercial banks, all 6 branches of the U.S. military, and MODs and DODs around the world. It also partners with the world’s biggest technology companies, system integrators, and managed service providers to help customers realize the full potential of their IT investments. Tanium has been named to the Forbes Cloud 100 list for eight consecutive years and ranks on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information on The Power of Certainty™, visit www.tanium.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X. 

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