Planning for a New Normal: This Is Just the Beginning

Life moves pretty fast at Tanium. When I joined at the end of 2019 it was already a hugely exciting time for the company. We had built a reputation for delivering strongly on our mission of solving complex IT challenges for the world’s largest enterprise and government organizations. The company had just completed another standout year, growing revenue over 50% year-over-year to exceed $430 million. We also help half of the FORTUNE 100, a majority of top global banks and retailers, and four branches of the US Armed Forces better manage and secure their enterprise endpoint environments. Yet little did we know that the COVID-19 pandemic would radically transform the way organizations work, requiring a new approach to endpoint security and management. It’s humbling to be a part of this mission.

We live in a world today very different from the one of six months ago. Extraordinary changes have been forced upon our customers over the past few weeks. The pandemic has brought about radical transformation for every organization at almost every level. For many of them, there will be no going back. As our CEO Orion Hindawi explains in a new Unfiltered TV interview, company leaders are waking up to the reality that the distributed workforce can bring huge productivity gains. Many businesses, like Twitter and Nationwide, are already planning to downsize office space in the years to come as mass remote working becomes the norm.

The COVID-19 reality is tragic for many, but it has opened the door to new opportunities. It’s also shined an uncompromising light on the way many IT environments are set-up and managed. If this is the new normal, there are plenty of operational and security challenges to overcome first. And it’s now my team’s job to build a global brand focused on how we uniquely serve and delight our customers.

New gaps exposed

Organizations have made monumental changes to support mass home working. But this shift has also exposed and expanded some major enterprise IT visibility and control gaps. Specifically, we are seeing in the market:

• More endpoints to manage, with many of them home PCs and devices which may be less well protected than corporate machines. Others may be corporate devices taken without consent. This amounts to a huge IT endpoint blind spot, meaning key systems are unpatched and exposed to threats.
• Sensitive data everywhere, as remote workers now have to shuttle business-critical information via their machines and home networks, increasing the chances of it leaking or being stolen.
• A surge in cyber-attacks as cybercriminals look to capitalize on distracted workers, unpatched remote infrastructure and an appetite for COVID-19 news which leaves staff vulnerable to social engineering.

Unfortunately, while enterprises have done well to get remote work up-and-running, many current approaches are unsustainable. IT and security teams are overstretched, VPNs have hit performance issues which may leave machines unpatched and there’s a fundamental lack of visibility and control, which 53% of global CIOs recently told us exposes them to a greater risk of cyber-attacks.

Here is a great example that further details how organizations are addressing the current challenges and closing critical visibility gaps with mass home working:

Built to close the gaps

According to a pulse survey conducted by ISC2, over one-third of respondents said they do not have the resources they need to support remote work long term. That’s because these challenges can’t be solved by the point solutions of the past, which often exacerbate IT/security silos and endpoint blind spots. Organizations instead need end-to-end visibility and control—both of the new distributed IT environment and traditional centralized infrastructure. They need to be able to monitor and manage usage, performance and security—to enforce policy, improve IT hygiene and keep workers as secure and productive as possible.

The good news is that Tanium is built for this.

Our unified endpoint management and security platform delivers accurate, real-time insight across your newly distributed technology environment. It gives you the tools to quickly and comprehensively answer mission-critical questions and then take action to remediate complex issues. Some of the world’s largest enterprises and government agencies are already using Tanium during this crisis for:

• Policy Governance: monitoring and enforcing policy and configuring devices and apps to meet internal standards
• IT Hygiene: daily vulnerability and patching scans to close bugs and help minimize the corporate attack surface
• VPN Optimization: monitoring and managing VPN endpoint usage to support high performance and productivity
• Software Management: deploying, configuring and updating third-party apps through a self-service interface to keep workers productive and secure
• Patch Management: detecting and fixing vulnerable endpoints without the need to use VPN infrastructure.

Our latest white paper sets out a three-stage plan to help organizations develop resilience, recover operations and plan for the new normal. In it, we provide the right questions IT and security leaders need to ask to help them achieve these outcomes and where endpoint management and security addresses critical gaps.

But it’s not just our product. At Tanium, we believe that great technology must go hand-in-hand with people and process. Our customers don’t just trust our product to help manage and secure the edge, they rely on the dedicated resources of our Technical Account Managers, our Incident Response (IR) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) experts.

With the initial shock of government-mandated lockdowns and social distancing now behind us, many organizations might be thinking the hard part is over. In fact, it’s just beginning. Regulators that have given companies a free pass up until now will be increasingly demanding going forward, as will many customers. Companies must continue to ensure personal information is stored and processed using the strictest safeguards. With endpoints increasingly becoming the center of gravity when it comes to access and experience, securing and managing them has never been more critical.

Now is the time to plan for the future and long-term differentiation, with a unified endpoint management and security infrastructure built for the world’s most complex and demanding environments. It’s time for Tanium.

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