IDC Finds Nearly 90% of IT Decision Makers Plan To Move from Point Solutions to Converged Platforms by 2024

Tanium, the industry’s only provider of converged endpoint management (XEM), today released findings from IDC, a leading provider of global IT research and advice, that demonstrate the numerous benefits realized by organizations that shift their endpoint management and security from independent point products to a converged, platform-based model.

The survey results reflect feedback from more than 1,500 global IT decision makers at enterprises and midsize businesses that validates the XEM approach just one year after its launch. By consolidating point-solution capabilities into a single platform with real-time visibility and control over endpoints across the environment, XEM enables organizations to mitigate risks faster than ever before by maintaining excellent cyber hygiene, remaining compliant, and remediating issues in real-time to combat the growing threat landscape.

“XEM effectively provides a single source of truth for an organization’s entire endpoint estate, allowing for greater unification and coordination across teams to reduce risk,” said Michael Suby, IDC research vice president. “Beyond the improved security introduced by a platform approach, Tanium’s XEM solution also offers increased productivity and significant cost savings thanks to team collaboration and vendor consolidation.”

As organizations become increasingly digitized and adopt work-from-anywhere approaches, 94% of them lack visibility into 20% or more of their endpoints. These blind spots are easy for threat actors to exploit, as evidenced by the rising pace of cyber incidents and the increasing costs from attacks. Meanwhile, IT and security teams are using more point products than ever before, which contributes to complexity, cost, data silos, and remediation delays.

“The need for converged endpoint management has grown rapidly to support the continued adoption of digital-transformation initiatives and the prevalence of work-from-anywhere policies,” said Tanium CMO Steve Daheb. “When you find that more than 50% of respondents in a survey like this use multiple endpoint management and security tools across many different teams, it’s easy to understand their desire to reduce the complexity and cost across their many environments while simultaneously reducing their risk from data breaches. Tanium’s unique platform approach is proving to be more vital than ever, as organizations no longer have the luxury of spending more on countless point solutions that continually fall short in providing them the protection they require.”

IDC analysts explore the advantages of converged endpoint management by capturing feedback from in-depth interviews with Tanium customers across industries that showcase the benefits:

• A large U.S. healthcare firm saved more than $1 million annually by replacing multiple point products with Tanium’s XEM platform
• A global logistics company cut its software licensing costs and subscription fees in half, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, by consolidating tools and moving to Tanium’s XEM platform approach
• A large eldercare management firm instantly deployed patches to affected systems using Tanium’s XEM platform, increasing compliance of those endpoints from 1% to more than 90%

“People don’t want to change [from solutions] they [already] know. I’ve seen it time and again,” said a technical director at a global logistics company logistics firm, explaining how the cost-savings introduced by XEM shifted that mindset within the company. “We saved so much money [with XEM] that nobody could defend wanting to keep [vendors that were] near and dear to them.”

The researchers note that with increased market volatility and economic uncertainty, the trend toward point-solution consolidation shows no signs of slowing. Nearly 90% of IT decision makers indicated their plans to move from point products to platforms in the next 18 months, and more than half are looking to make a change within the next six to 12 months.

Other survey findings show:

• Customers using XEM can save the equivalent of up to one full-time employee per 200 devices supported
• For every 250 devices supported, customers can save as much as $100,000
• Nearly 60% of customers identified real-time visibility as a top requirement for managing risk
• 75% of organizations have separate teams to manage and secure endpoints, resulting in siloed work streams, reduced productivity, and increased software licensing fees
• 60% of IT decision makers want to reduce the number of vendors and tools they use for both endpoint management and security
• Organizations with fully operational XEM improved their security posture by deploying Windows patches, updates, and upgrades 22% more often, with staff productivity improving as a result of shorter deployment times and automated updates

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