Working Together is Always Better: Day Two of Tanium Converge 2021

When faced with an overwhelming number of challenges, it can be difficult to focus. We are juggling distributed staff working from home, retooling with digital products to improve our businesses, and facing new vulnerabilities and cyber threats that arise almost daily. We are staring at a new equation, and it’s definitely higher math.

Yesterday our keynote speakers shared ways for us to find traction and move forward. Day two of Converge reminded us that we’re in this together and dived deeper into how we can better assess risk and manage the future that comes our way.

Vikram Mansharamanin, author of Think for Yourself, highlights better ways to leverage multiple perspectives when making tough decisions. Todd Palmer, Tanium’s SVP of partner sales, and Howard Boville, SVP and head of IBM Cloud, emphasized the power of strong partnerships to solve complex problems. Our product leaders then previewed an exciting lineup of solutions that flexibly address current and future challenges. And we close with an honest and thought-provoking fireside chat between Tanium’s CEO Orion Hindawi and Ash Carter, former Secretary of State and current Tanium board member.

Mining more data through a variety of lenses

Vikram Mansharamanin reminds us that as individuals, our perspective is limited, biased and incomplete. “Right now, the world is full of uncertainties, which can be seen through many lenses. The more lenses you bring to a scenario the better.” And following this thread, he recommends leveraging generalists over relying on subject matter experts with a single perspective to help connect the dots to solve these huge puzzles we are facing.

He points out how the recent pandemic has taught us how interconnected we are, including to our foes. To wit, our supply chain issues. Driven by the rivalry between the US and China, the global supply chain is shifting. The global geography of manufacturing is changing, and we can anticipate large impacts to everyone, everywhere. Will we end up with two global economies? On the surface, it’s hard to see what’s coming. But underneath, the data lies waiting to be mined by those who can correlate the pieces across many lenses (economic, political science, technology, etc.) to complete the puzzle.

“When you combine those perspectives with more data, better data, connecting across different forms of data, you can navigate through this uncertainty with better success.” Mansharamanin also reminds us to see these challenges not just as threats but as opportunities. By looking ahead two or three steps, by making decisions from more data rather than less, you may find ways to create an advantage. When thinking this way, connecting the dots may reveal scary situations, but it can also enable growth and differentiation. “We can all learn from this process of navigating uncertainty.”

Partnering moves us forward, stronger and better

A common thread this Converge is working together to navigate these challenging times and using a wider set of data to connect the dots. “What we accomplish together is far more than what we can accomplish alone,” says Tanium’s Todd Palmer, who works with our partners day in and out to strengthen not only our customer solutions but also our own internal environment and technology.

Tanium has invested heavily these past two years into building an improved, innovative partner program and global partner team that accelerates and amplifies what we can accomplish together. As an example, Palmer speaks to our significantly expanded training paths and lab environments for partners. “You’ve told us how critical it is that your technology providers collaborate and integrate their products to help you with new innovative use cases and creating a more seamless experience for your teams that operate these technologies.”

To help illustrate the power of partnership, IBM’s Howard Boville joined us to share how we’re tackling a complex problem together for customers in highly regulated industries that have hybrid multi-cloud offerings. As SVP and head of IBM Cloud, Boville’s developing a platform that allows businesses to tap into the regulatory controls and frameworks in their domains without having to interpret, build, and sustain the regulatory requirements and controls themselves. And after the hard work of collecting, coordinating, and clarifying the standards, IBM will be sharing this platform with other cloud providers too. Like everyone else, IBM needed to solve for all the critical security, risk and compliance needs customers have while using a platform. Boville explained, “Tanium meets that requirement better than any other company we’ve partnered with.”

Check out this keynote to learn more about this joint effort. And here’s an official shout out to the 70-plus partners sponsoring or collaborating at us at this year’s Converge!

Evolving our products to better power your truth

In our product strategy and roadmap keynote, Chief Product Officer Pete Constantine introduced an exciting array of innovations and capabilities that extend the intelligence and reach of the Tanium platform. More support for managing the never-ending proliferation of devices? Check. Tools that adapt to a rapidly changing threat landscape? Check. And all more efficiently and faster than before.

Got visibility? It’s not a smooth slogan but the answer is crucial. No one should underestimate the risks afforded by unmanaged devices on your network. Josh Schofield is up first to announce Tanium’s forthcoming ability to discover endpoints on distributed networks. This innovative architecture finds new networks and endpoints where Tanium clients don’t exist, turning the invisible visible. Pair that with Mobile Device Management (MDM) and a new Interact reporting experience that brings all your data together in one place, where you can generate the insights you need about your risk and vulnerability across all devices, managed or unmanaged.

Next, Payal Mehrotra revealed advancements in Tanium’s approach to assessing risk and managing compliance. She introduced easier and more efficient ways to assess, prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities and configuration issues. An innovative new risk score helps prioritize the data found on each device so that you can better understand your risk at every level (be it devices, departments, risk vectors, or the entire enterprise) and focus your actions.

Stephanie Aceves highlighted upcoming enhancements to Tanium’s security portfolio, where we are rolling out flexible approaches to help you respond to threats. Stephanie demoed a new Threat Response experience for taking an investigation from start to finish. A new workflow allows you to search your estate for evidence of an arbitrary indicator, like a hash or file name. You can quickly triage any machines with evidence of that indicator, add the evidence to an investigation and review it on a visual timeline. Investigations allow you to collaborate across teams and time zones and more efficiently track and close incidents. She finishes with asking you to imagine correlating all the valuable information Tanium gathers to help find weaknesses in your environment without having to rely on industry intel and detections. That’s the future of threat hunting!

Constantine wraps up by unveiling one more special project, called Prevent. Did you know that the vast majority of cyberattacks have occurred in organizations with endpoint protection tools installed, up-to-date, and functioning? It’s simply not enough. Prevent helps you quickly identify how administrative privileges are used across your entire estate so that you can perform an audit and remove as many as possible. “Only a small number of users and applications require interactive admin rights on their systems day-to-day,” Constantine says during the demo. The Prevent Project’s goal is to establish a model of “least privilege” across Windows endpoints to enable application control with an explicit “allow-only” approach.

If you thrive on details about our upcoming solutions and you didn’t catch this live, you’ll certainly want to watch this keynote on demand.

Ash Carter on why the tech sector should help defend our country

Converge day two wrapped up with an amazing and must-see fireside chat between our CEO Orion Hindawi and our nation’s 25th Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter. Along with being a former Rhodes scholar and Harvard professor who also studied theoretical physics, did you know Carter has long championed initiatives that bring technology companies and the Department of Defense (DoD) together to protect our nation? Tanium is incredibly lucky to have him on our own board of directors.

Hindawi kicks things off with asking about his work bridging the divide between Silicon Valley and our government. Carter concedes that while it’s better, there is a long way to go. Unfortunately, many tech companies have become disinterested in helping, whether because they don’t care or just a general dislike of the government in general. Ash explains that he comes from a different generation, where the mentality is more, “Get involved, get in the game. Don’t complain, don’t sit on sidelines.”

Carter must bring new ideas to the table to bridge this divide. When it comes to our nation’s defense, building roads, running public education, all those things without a profit motive, he must get technologists to see that the government “is not an alien enemy thing, it’s just us.”

On the cyber front, Hindawi asks about the relative risk between kinetic nuclear and cyber threats. Carter highlights Tanium as being extremely important to the DoD in this regard, where they see any type of attack as significant. It’s not just a government problem — it’s a national problem when all businesses must contend with cyber threats.

Carter says, “even small companies can bring themselves up to a reasonable level of hygiene so that you can’t take a cheap shot against them. One of the things that’s good about Tanium is that it offers, even to a small- and medium-sized enterprise, a digestible package with a high level of protection in a way that they can accept.”

This conversation covered more territory that you really must watch if you missed it but ends on an uplifting note worth sharing. As the two discuss how it feels for Carter to work in the private sector (very pleasant, we learn), he and Hindawi bring the point home: helping your country improve its technology is a noble pursuit and working for the greater good rewards the soul. Orion suggests people interviewing with Tanium take note.

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These keynotes are just a small sample of all the great insights and information available at Converge 2021. The good news is that you can binge on all of it on your time. Catch up on the on-demand presentations and breakout sessions.