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How Tanium Could Generate ROI of 277% Over Three Years

We take a look at the new Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study

Analyst Insights

IT and security decision-makers have plenty to keep themselves busy. When they’re not developing and updating policy, meeting board members and key partners, and managing critical compliance issues, there’s always something else waiting just around the corner. That doesn’t leave much time for the important task of appraising new technology solutions. This is where studies like Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ studies come in.

A new version based on an analysis of Tanium customer feedback, reveals that a composite customer using the Tanium platform could drive return on investment (ROI) of 277%, risk-adjusted benefits of $5.3 million and net present value (NPV) of $3.9 million over three years.

Watch this video interview with our featured guest, Forrester TEI consultant, Tsih Formuluh, breaking down the findings from the study.

How the study works

The Forrester study goes beyond typical industry methods to give IT buyers the robust insight they need to make better business decisions. Interviews with four Tanium customers elicit the key benefits they’re extracting from the platform, as well as the main costs associated with purchasing and implementation. Forrester then aggregates these results to build a hypothetical “composite organization.”

Forrester Consulting builds a financial model, adjusting benefits and costs depending on the consistency of risks such as IT complexity, number of legacy point solutions in use and average cost of each legacy solution. The model also considers flexibility — the ability to do something cheaper, better or faster in the future because of prior investment in the technology.

It’s a unique methodology that enables IT decision-makers to input data from their organization to see the economic impact of using Tanium.

What Forrester found

Feedback from those customers describes how Tanium has helped them to solve some key security and operational challenges, including:

  • A lack of visibility into how many endpoints are running
  • Siloed security and operations tools and processes
  • Too many dedicated security and operations point solutions
  • Expensive and intrusive point solutions

The study reveals that customers have been able to improve visibility to more than 98% of all endpoints in their environment. And Tanium agents running on all endpoints have enabled these organizations to find and remediate vulnerabilities much faster. This visibility and control, delivered from a single Tanium platform, has also driven improved collaboration between security and operations teams, breaking down silos.

In summary, Forrester found three headline economic benefits to using Tanium:

  • Tool consolidation savings of more than $2.4 million — as a result of eliminating legacy point solutions
  • Idle software reclamation savings of $1.7 million — realized from using Tanium to discover unmanaged assets, or unused applications on endpoints which could be eliminated
  • Full-time employee (FTE) efficiency savings of $1.2 million, because staff no longer have to jump between point solutions to address endpoint security, management and IT operations tasks

According to the Forrester study, for a composite organization, it all added up to an ROI of 277% over three years and a payback period of under six months.


You can read the full Total Economic Impact™ of Tanium study here.

Tanium Staff

Tanium’s village of experts co-writes as Tanium Staff, sharing their lens on security, IT operations, and other relevant topics across the business and cybersphere.

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