Day Two Tanium Converge 2024 Recap: New Product Capabilities and Mayim Bialik on Mental Health and Building Trust in AI
Highlights include Tanium platform announcements, launch of the Tanium Titans Community Program, and a customer panel of industry leaders
Building on the announcements, demonstrations, and vision for Tanium Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM) shared during the first day of Converge 2024, Tanium’s annual conference being held in Orlando, Florida, day two kept this momentum going as we continued to dive deeper into the transformative platform capabilities that will power the Real-Time Platform for AI™.
Women in Tech breakfast
As any great day starts, day two of Converge kicked off with our second annual Women in Tech breakfast, where Tanium Regional VP Claire Dwyer guided engaging conversations around gender equity, collaboration, and empowering women in the tech industry.
Attendees not only got to enjoy a great meal, but the breakfast featured a valuable and inspiring “fireside chat” with Tanium CEO Dan Streetman and Jennifer Link, CISO at the CIA, and an all-female panel discussion with many esteemed speakers, including Patty Voight, CISO at Webster Bank; Traci Byrne, head of global security strategy and GTM at World Wide Technology (WWT); Cheryl Nifong, CISO at the University of Texas at Arlington; and Melissa Bischoping, senior director of security and product design research at Tanium, who shared real-life examples to help shed light on core issues like career progression, leadership, and overcoming barriers.
We want to thank all the participants for this meaningful and inspirational event!
Opening remarks
After breakfast, day two’s keynotes began with Tanium CTO Matt Quinn recapping day one’s exciting product announcements that support our goal of helping organizations improve their confidence.
Today’s session builds on yesterday’s keynotes, where we discussed three central topics – trust and safety in our platform, expanding endpoint visibility to provide you the ability to see more, and our automation and AI capabilities culminating into the platform evolution to Tanium autonomous endpoint management (AEM).
During day one, we heard directly from key partners like ServiceNow and Avanade about the synergy and benefits of integrating with the Tanium platform to leverage these autonomous innovations and real-time data, an industry analyst from Gartner about the challenges that led to the creation of the new AEM category and Tanium’s role in leading this evolution, and many customer success stories that highlighted how Tanium helps their efforts to become more resilient and secure. There were also several live product demos of Tanium AEM to showcase features, many of which are already available to Tanium customers since owning Tanium means you already have Tanium AEM.
To see these keynotes and more highlights from day one, register for Converge to access them on-demand starting November 26.
With all this news around Tanium AEM, today’s keynotes aimed to bring the discussion back to our platform to share updates around the key focus areas that will continue to drive our solutions forward. To do this, Matt welcomed Tanium Sr. VP of Product Management Randy Menon to the stage.
Read about the capabilities and innovations of Tanium AEM
What product investments will Tanium make in 2025?
Randy began his keynote by recapping how yesterday, Converge attendees heard about AEM and the launch of several capabilities, such as playbooks, deployment rings, and confidence scores, in addition to our vision for endpoint expansions and the general evolution of the Tanium platform into the Real-time Platform for AI™.
He explained how our mission continues to support any of the endpoints you want to manage, protect, and remediate by empowering you to take the right actions and providing intelligent tools that allow you to operate with complete trust and safety. Today’s keynotes will focus on walking through our product roadmap to present what comes next in support of this mission.
Randy used three main themes to describe our product focus areas: AEM and endpoint expansion, supportability, and our platform, products, and ecosystem, which includes our partner integrations.
- For AEM and endpoint expansion, Randy described how each product area contributes to these efforts to get the right outcomes for our customers by enhancing ease of use.
- For supportability, the Tanium engineering team is focused on ensuring our products can be easily maintained, repaired, and supported throughout the entire lifecycle, which is critical for long-term success.
- For our platform, products, ecosystem, and integrations, he explained that we continue to invest in initiatives and products that help maximize the value of your current IT investments, including our strategic partnerships with Microsoft and ServiceNow.
To explore these plans more in depth, Randy invited several Tanium product leaders to the stage to discuss the specifics of the updates and innovations on their roadmaps.
What’s planned for the Tanium platform?
Tanium VP of Product Management Jason Ellison discussed how the Tanium platform is the foundational core of all our solutions and our goals around continuing to partner with you to ensure it remains a stable and reliable platform you can trust.
To achieve these goals, Jason explained how we’re continuing to build and extend foundational capabilities to ensure that our customers gain the comprehensive visibility and control that meets today’s demands with flexibility to address future needs.
As a quick look back at some of the meaningful updates for the platform over the past year, we provided customers with the ability to control the progressive rollout of client upgrades and tooling. We also enhanced our Endpoint Change Management (ECM) feature to offer even more choices, including expanding the number of deployment rings for greater control and distribution.
Looking ahead, Jason described how we’re aligning ECM to AEM to take advantage of advanced capabilities and adaptive actions like conditional deployments based on execution success rate and performance.
We plan to add customizable Tanium Managed Playbooks pre-curated for common use cases and available out-of-the-box that will be supported by ongoing updates. We’re also introducing Parameterized Playbooks, which will allow for dynamic targeting and action parameters. Additionally, users will receive instant feedback on playbook progress from in-console notifications.
Playbooks will also be more integrated throughout the Tanium console, meaning users can initiate playbook runs from various console areas, such as Tanium Reports, Tanium Dashboards, and Tanium Interact. Additionally, there will be more integrations with modules like Tanium Comply, Tanium Threat Response, Tanium Enforce, and others. These updates aim to make playbooks more accessible and better integrated within the Tanium ecosystem.
For more updates on the Tanium platform, including our plans for extending our ability to capture information from devices traditionally thought of as outside of IT’s control, including mobile, operational technology (OT), and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, register for Converge to access on-demand recordings available on November 26.
Simplifying and improving the platform experience
Randy discussed that there are two other aspects that serve as foundational pieces of our planned Tanium platform updates: improving your ability to get to data and analysis quicker and simplifying the API experience.
He explained how we plan to make enhancements to the user experience in the platform, including the ability to get to data with fewer clicks and report on more phases of the endpoint lifecycle with historical data, compute metrics that are unique to your business, alerts on critical thresholds, and more. Randy also spoke about our work to lower the barrier to integrating REST and GraphQL APIs to provide a consistent and modern experience across different types of APIs.
Additionally, to support better ease of use, Tanium plans to support more end-to-end workflows optimized for many commonly used operations, such as the overlapping needs of endpoint management and digital employee experience (DEX) teams, as they are not only responsible for IT operations but are frequently asked to think about the impact changes will have on employee experience.
Randy shared several other workflows the Tanium platform will support, including:
- Bringing the power of Tanium Provision and Tanium Deploy into Tanium Automate to simplify complex software installation workflows
- Streamlining vulnerability to remediation
- Resolving code vulnerabilities through Tanium Patch and Deploy
- Several more use cases that support ensuring compliance and keeping third-party apps up to date
Randy also talked about our plans to help customers gain more visibility into root cause attribution and support their ability to quickly apply remediation at the root – not just constantly fixing the symptoms of issues – leveraging many of the key enhancements in Tanium AEM shared during yesterday’s keynotes, including Confidence Scores and Tanium Guide.
Randy announced the Tanium platform has plans to allow monitoring at the GPU level, including GPU utilization, memory usage, and thermal performance, as well as browsers, including web apps that can point to app performance problems, which are all critical to helping you prevent issues like hardware failures and user experience more easily and before problems occur.
To see more from this keynote about the Tanium platform roadmap and other content, register to gain access to Converge on-demand starting November 26.
Product plans for Tanium Risk & Compliance
Tanium Sr. Director of Product Management Julia Grunewald took the stage next to discuss three main themes for our risk and compliance portfolio, which included:
- Increasing visibility to give you insights into more of your ecosystem
- Improving performance and usability to give you the best possible experience with the tools already part of your processes
- Enhancing remediation visibility by allowing Tanium to show you a risk and how to fix it, making the process as efficient and automated as possible
Announcing Tanium Cloud Workloads
Julia announced our plans to give you better insight into your containerized environments with Tanium Cloud Workloads. This visibility includes inventory data, risks, and vulnerabilities with policy-level control and an out-of-the-box workbench to support easy configuration and response.
However, as Julia described, the real value of container support comes from integrating it seamlessly into the Tanium modules you’re already using. For example, using Tanium Asset, we’ll give you reports for your container inventory, software bill of materials (SBOM), and more useful reporting so that you can understand your images, clusters, and running containers to track when an image became an actual container, where it ran, and when it stopped to more easily identify unauthorized rogue containers or those using unapproved images at a glance.
To take these risk identification and reduction abilities even further, we’re also introducing container image scanning and vulnerability management so you can see your image vulnerabilities in line with other vulnerabilities in your ecosystem for a more complete view of your overall risk.
Make sure to register to watch all the Converge keynotes on-demand starting November 26 to learn about other exciting new features around containers and planned updates for Tanium Risk & Compliance, including:
- How we’re streamlining Kubernetes cluster monitoring and policy enforcement to support compliance efforts
- The ability to ingest exploit intelligence into Tanium Comply so you can see how likely a specific vulnerability is to be exploited and the resulting business impact
- Making assessments easier to use and manage
- The ability to prioritize vulnerabilities by risk and remediation action for improved security and operations team collaboration
- Expanding remediation views to include application updates so your team can focus on the most impactful vulnerabilities that require their skills and expertise
What’s new for Tanium Incident Response?
Tanium Sr. Director of Product Management Stephanie Aceves discussed new and upcoming product innovations that support our mission of ensuring continuous endpoint monitoring and protection with Tanium Incident Response, including the recently released Endpoint Reactions built to disrupt attacks in real time.
She also talked about another powerful feature in Tanium Incident Response that uses baked-in logic on the endpoint, which will trigger even if the endpoint is offline. This capability is particularly useful in scenarios where endpoints may be temporarily disconnected from the network, such as remote or mobile devices, or due to a security incident. This feature ensures that security measures are continuously enforced, reducing the risk of undetected threats.
Stephanie referred to yesterday’s keynote from Tanium VP of AI Harman Kaur, who shared how we’re reimagining how organizations can simplify and improve traditionally complex and time-consuming efforts using Tanium AEM. She then spoke about how these same principles apply to how Tanium can support creating better experiences that align with how your team thinks about its security measures – never requiring you to know how Tanium Threat Response works, just what you’re trying to accomplish.
Shifting the discussion to the future roadmap, Stephanie explained how great security teams require quick context and data about the relevant threats. To achieve this, the Tanium incident response portfolio will continue to focus on three key initiatives: automation, precision, and our ecosystems and integrations.
- Automation: Alongside the threat response engineering team, the human operators and security research team will deliver more out-of-the-box playbooks, not only for interrupting attacks but also for helping you with incident response. She discussed how this includes triggering playbooks directly from Threat Response, where you can define what will kick off an entire playbook with alerting to keep you informed.
- Precision: Stephanie spoke about how Tanium is helping organizations move their visibility further left of the chain. With our insights engine, you’re able to see vulnerabilities and threats ahead of when they are released, and, more importantly, the security research team Tanium Sr. Director of Security and Product Design Research Melissa Bischoping runs will deliver customized playbooks before your team knows they exist. As Stephanie described, you can think of our precision features as a sniper aiming at and quickly addressing the exact issue and nothing more.
- Ecosystem and integrations: As we heard from Tanium Director of Technical Product Management Shelly Sahani and Field CIO of Strategic Partnerships Saqib Khan during yesterday’s keynotes about our expansive partnerships with Microsoft and ServiceNow, Tanium will have integrations between Threat Response and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint (MDE) and Threat Response and ServiceNow as many customers start their incident response and investigation processes in MDE or their SIEM, but they often want to take the incident details and pivot into Tanium because the other solutions are not fully deployed or they want that extra assurance they’ve properly scoped an incident. To enable this integration, Tanium can now automate extracting all the information to create an intel document to help ensure you’ve identified everything. No more manual copy and paste or second-guessing whether you have all the data. Tanium gives you confidence that you have all the critical information you need in one place.
To see the full keynote for Tanium Threat Response, including Stephanie illustrating the power of Endpoint Reactions and its surgical automation feature that keeps legitimate processes running while quickly halting harmful actions to stop the movement of threat actors, register to gain access to the on-demand content from Converge – available November 26.
Tanium continues to realize the power of partnerships for customers
Tanium Director of Product Management Brent Foster discussed our plans for enhancing our integrations and further building partnerships with key vendors like Microsoft and ServiceNow to provide comprehensive solutions that allow Tanium customers to get the most value out of the tools they already own.
He provided additional information about plans to expand our capabilities within Microsoft Security Copilot, Azure VM extensions, and other products as part of our commitment to working and amplifying our integrations with Microsoft.
Additionally, Tanium is aligning our solutions to a value framework with ServiceNow, helping you plan your journey to get the most value. The value framework gives you a phased approach to your deployment by looking at how you can best use Tanium and ServiceNow, from getting more visibility into your hardware, software, and virtual assets to managing risk and remediating it in real time. Regulatory compliance? We can cover that through continuous monitoring capabilities. We’re also bringing AI and automation directly into the ServiceNow management framework.
He described how we have two major focus areas around the solutions that we deliver with ServiceNow today, including:
- For IT: Solutions like Tanium ITX for ServiceNow enable a rich set of capabilities with ServiceNow asset service management.
- For operations: Organizations can manage risk, compliance, and security incident response with Tanium Security Operations for ServiceNow by integrating real-time endpoint data with ServiceNow’s workflows. Additionally, Tanium Patch Management for ServiceNow IT Operations is focused on how we can enable IT teams to automate tasks like Patch Tuesday, which allows security teams to focus on resolving critical vulnerabilities and organizational risks.
Introducing Tanium Integrations
Brent explained how, by taking an API-first approach at the platform level, we currently enable our tech partners and customers to build amazing integrations with us. However, we know these integrations need to be easier to find and use.
To address this need, he announced the creation of an integrations gallery within the Tanium console, which will make it easy for users to find, deploy, and use the integrations we’ve built.
To hear more about our integrations with Microsoft and ServiceNow, including the launch of a new set of capabilities around integrating risk management to support your governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) strategies by bringing the best of Tanium AEM into ServiceNow, sign up for access to on-demand content from the event available starting November 26.
Announcing the Tanium Titans Community Program
Following these product insights, next to the stage at Converge was Tanium Chief Customer Officer Charles Ross, who announced an evolution of our existing community that makes connecting, learning, and growing with us even more rewarding: the Tanium Titans Community Program.
The Tanium Titans Community Program recognizes members for their contributions in building a strong online community. By guiding peers and sharing knowledge, members can earn points, badges, and premium Tanium swag. You can join the Tanium Community today, and we look forward to seeing your name on top of the leaderboard!
To kick off celebrating those dedicated users within the Tanium community, Bill Nolan, VP at Deutsche Bank, was honored with a Tanium-branded bomber jacket featuring a specialized Tanium Titans patch in recognition of his leadership in the Tanium community. A colleague graciously accepted the jacket on his behalf.
Tanium customer panel insights
After the Tanium Titans announcement, Charles welcomed several customers on stage to host a panel that included Greg McCarthy, CISO at the city of Boston; Adam Levinson, VP of managed cloud services for the intelligent spend business network at SAP; and Vicky Laurens, VP of security engineering and deployment at Scotiabank.
The panel discussed the benefits of the Tanium platform from the perspective of the distinct challenges within their industries and the local government sector, with a significant focus on how Tanium’s real-time data and automation can be used to enhance their operational efficiencies, mitigate risks, and the value Tanium partnerships with Microsoft and ServiceNow bring to their efforts.
Mayim Bialik: A neuroscientist’s perspective on mental health and building trust in AI
Tanium CIO Jake McClean welcomed Mayim Bialik to share her insights on neuroscience and how they intersect with broader themes discussed throughout Converge, including balancing human effort, prioritizing efficiency, and building trust in AI.
Mayim walked attendees through her diverse career and how her experiences as a parent and scientist studying human behavior have shaped how she views the world.
Since many in attendance at Converge are IT, operations, and security leaders, the discussion turned to how these professionals are constantly under so much stress due to the nature of their roles.
Mayim agreed that when things must happen with a level of precision, efficiency, and urgency, the stakes are obviously high and explained how this fast-paced culture can really take a toll on mental and physical health, often leading to the removal of the human element.
We are human beings; we’re not human doings.
When asked how she would go about addressing these stressors from a neurological standpoint, she discussed the importance of prioritizing your health, such as practicing gratitude and getting quality sleep, and how, while the science around the effects of such stressful lifestyles is ongoing, it’s very likely to show that we must improve our habits to better minimize and cope with these challenges.
The fact that mental health is even a part of any conversation right now in these kind of conferences is already hugely important. It’s evidence that we can’t ignore.
Jake described how they were surrounded by a “room of protectors” who deal with the security and safety of their organizations daily. Mayim explained how she feels that while it takes all kinds of people to make things run, one of the differentiators for these professionals is they typically can tolerate aspects of urgency and risk, tackling these kinds of tasks in ways others cannot. She mentioned how there’s often a difference in their brains and limbic systems that allows people to receive danger and multitask, not just several tasks at once but also the ability to assign the appropriate prioritization to each task.
The discussion then shifted to talk more about the use of AI in supporting and improving efforts around security and streamlining efficiencies and how some professionals are still questioning adopting AI due to a feeling of discomfort and overall distrust of the technology, which prevents them from realizing its potential benefits. Jake asked Mayim her thoughts on effective ways to build this trust in AI.
When it comes to efficiency and really appreciating the wonders of what we have created, [AI is] limitless.
Mayim responded that many people tend to have a binary view of AI, thinking we either use it or don’t, or we either love or hate it. She reflected that what we are actually experiencing is a more nuanced integration and understanding. In fact, there are aspects of human experience that we simply don’t need to worry about AI replicating or replacing. Instead, she noted that our advancements should enable us to use this technology without fear to make things more efficient and clearer.
To see the full keynote with Mayim Bialik, which includes additional conversations around women in STEM, register to receive access to all the Converge content available on November 26.
Who protects the protectors? Final thoughts on day two of Converge
Tanium CEO Dan Streetman concluded day two’s keynotes by circling back to Jake and Mayim’s “protectors ” discussion.
He recognized that protectors are all the high-stakes roles and the people who are called on to solve all the hard problems. Dan emphasized Tanium’s commitment to providing you, the protectors, with the confidence needed to meet the responsibilities of their roles, whatever they may be, and how we are proud to stand alongside them as they navigate the ever-evolving threat landscape and challenges they face.
We hope to see everyone again and more new faces at Converge in 2025, which will be back in Orlando!
We’re grateful to share our vision with you. And just as importantly, to talk about where we’re going together.
Did you miss attending the event in person? You can still register for Tanium Converge to unlock the ability to watch on-demand recordings of all the keynotes and other content on demand.
Tanium’s statements regarding its plans, directions, and intent are subject to change without notice at Tanium’s sole discretion. Information regarding potential future products or functionality is intended to outline our general product direction and it should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision, nor is it incorporated into any contract. It is not a commitment, promise, or legal obligation. The development, release, and timing of any future products or functionality remain at our sole discretion.