9 Ways Tanium Makes Asset Discovery and Inventory Faster, Simpler, Easier and…Better

Endpoint Management lets IT teams manage an organization’s endpoint devices — including laptops, tablets, PCs, servers, and “bring your own device” (BYoD) assets — from a single control point. 

But you can’t manage them if you can’t find them. Finding them is what the process of asset discovery and inventory is all about. 

And there are a lot of tools out there claiming to do that job but don’t deliver the visibility required to monitor endpoints for active threats and potential vulnerabilities. 

In this blog, we’ll explain the failures of traditional asset discovery and inventory tools and how you can get the visibility you need from Tanium.

Three reasons most asset discovery and inventory tools can’t cut it

Whether you work for a mid-sized business or a larger organization, chances are your endpoint environment is expanding. 

It’s a moving target, so that alone makes it challenging to track and control. Plus, it’s not just about the volume of endpoints. Endpoints have also become much more diverse, spanning from mobile phones to cloud services. 

As a result, organizations of all kinds are faced with remote, virtual, and BYoD assets and software — some approved, some not. Shadow IT, rogue devices…it’s a jungle out there.

Legacy tools struggle to bring order to today’s endpoint chaos. Here’s why.

They don’t know where to look.

Legacy tools are often blind to many assets and their details. They have difficulty collecting the right information, or, typically, the process just takes too long or uses up too much bandwidth. Rarely is information real-time. And traditional tools often cannot see unknown network devices.

They’re “confused” by changes in the environment.

Traditional endpoint management tools can often experience trouble tracking and inventorying assets that regularly disconnect from the central network or don’t act like conventional on-premises assets. Remote or internal networks that haven’t been configured for review also remain hidden.

They don’t play well together.

A complete solution requires multiple tools that typically do not integrate smoothly. Extra tools commonly strain network bandwidth with duplicative efforts. Often, teams have to resort to multi-team, manual efforts to produce reports on spreadsheets or other kludges.  

Nine ways Tanium can help

Tanium Asset Discovery and Inventory provides a comprehensive, reliable, and actionable picture of your endpoint environment. Its technology efficiently investigates areas of the network where common endpoint tools may not know how or where to look for “hidden” devices — including endpoints that don’t report properly via traditional methods. 

Tanium also offers additional contextual detail on each endpoint — including hardware configurations, installed software, and how that software was used over 30-, 60-, and 90-day intervals.

Without affecting network performance, Tanium can help you:

1. Find unknown endpoints. Identify 10-20 percent more endpoints in your environment than you’re currently aware of. If you can’t see it, you can’t secure it.

2. Collect data consistently. Develop a single source of truth that provides a current and reliable picture of your entire environment.

3. Catalog lost assets. Maintain an accurate inventory of remote assets anywhere, anytime — while understanding the state of those assets.

4. Increase the percent of endpoints under management. Reduce risk by securing and managing more of your endpoints using flexible discovery and automation.

5. Decrease mean-time-to-manage. Rapidly identify new endpoints entering your environment and bring them under control.

6. Track software usage and coverage percent. Track usage and percentage of unused installed software on each of your endpoints.

7. Reallocate resources. Stop allocating 90 percent of your time collecting data and instead put that data to work.

8. Optimize investments. Analyze usage data across hardware and software assets to rationalize your spend and derive additional value from existing solutions through robust integrations.

9. Mitigate risk and inefficiency. Centralize visibility and control for managed and unmanaged assets. Drive consistency and eliminate variability and guesswork.

Build a mature asset inventory in a simple four-step cycle

Tanium delivers asset discovery and inventory capabilities that increase in effectiveness the longer you use the platform. As your process matures, you’ll create an increasing number of standardized reports that inform stakeholders, alerting them to required action items, in real-time.

Many of our customers use the following process to bring greater command of their assets:

STEP 1. Establish visibility by performing a comprehensive initial scan of their entire environment.

STEP 2. Find issues by discovering unknown, unmanaged and vulnerable assets in the environment.

STEP 3. Secure your devices and other endpoints by closing vulnerabilities and bringing unknown and unmanaged endpoints into as much control as possible.

STEP 4. Establish ongoing asset monitoring; repeat this cycle as new assets enter and known assets change their status.

Tanium Asset Discovery and Inventory is part of the Tanium Endpoint Management and Security Platform

The Tanium Platform provides a modular suite of services that can be adopted individually to fit your most pressing IT Ops or security needs. 

The Tanium Platform can fill gaps within an organization’s existing endpoint management processes, while providing a rich portfolio of additional capabilities.

Tanium was built on an ultra-fast, scalable and modern architecture designed to solve the unique challenges of today’s expansive, dynamic and distributed endpoint environments. It supports a wide range of operating systems, servers, and cloud-based IaaS backbones.

The Tanium Platform offers real-time visibility and control over environments with thousands to millions of endpoints — combining accurate, up-to-date data collection with a flexible suite of remote remediation capabilities deployed through a single agent and delivered through a unified console.

Tanium is built to address today’s challenges

Tanium can deliver fundamental, holistic and effective asset discovery and inventory for the most demanding and complex digital infrastructures. As our customers know, our out-of-the-box solutions, modules and workflows provide the tools needed to gain context-driven visibility into their IT operations.

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Visit our website to learn more about Tanium Asset Discover and Inventory or sign up for a demo today.

You can also read my other blog post IT Hygiene Begins With Asset Discovery and Inventory.