Sensitive Data Monitoring: 10 Ways Tanium Makes It Accurate, Comprehensive and Lightweight

Sensitive data monitoring is more important — and challenging — than ever. Organizations now store countless instances of sensitive data within global, distributed environments. This data is constantly moving, changing and being accessed and is subject to a growing patchwork of regulations.

Unfortunately, most organizations struggle to monitor and manage their sensitive data. They typically use point solutions that apply only to a single asset class, a single type of sensitive data or a single compliance framework. These tools often provide stale and incomplete data even within their limited scope.

The result: Most information security professionals have invested heavily in these tools but still do not know what sensitive data they store in their environment, where those data live and whether they have been tampered with.

Thankfully, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Tanium gives you a modern approach to sensitive data monitoring. With Tanium, you can create a complete and accurate inventory of your sensitive data in your environment in minutes. And in this blog, we’ll explore the 10 ways Tanium tangibly improves sensitive data monitoring.

Let’s dig in.

The top 10 ways Tanium improves sensitive data monitoring

When you perform sensitive data monitoring with Tanium, you will:

1. Create a complete, real-time picture of the sensitive data in your environment

With traditional tools, organizations often cannot identify every endpoint in their environment, let alone what sensitive data those endpoints are storing.

As a result, organizations often store countless instances of sensitive data that they don’t know about — leaving them vulnerable to undetected data loss, theft, and leakage, as well as costly regulatory compliance violations.

With Tanium, you will find every endpoint in your environment — including unmanaged endpoints and hard-to-find assets like remote endpoints that live off-network — and identify the sensitive data they store.

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2. Manage a wide range of sensitive data from a single, unified platform

With traditional tools, organizations often have to deploy multiple point solutions — each of which covers only a single data monitoring use case — to attempt to gain visibility into every type of sensitive data in their environment.

As a result, organizations must manage a wealth of different systems and infrastructure and then integrate, centralize and normalize multiple reports just to create a centralized view of their data environment.

With Tanium, you will monitor more than 30 of the most common file types where sensitive data may be found. Those file types include Personally Identifiable Information (PII), personal health information and project keywords located across Windows, Mac, and Linux endpoints, from a single unified platform.

3. Identify complex, hard-to-find data patterns stored in documents across the enterprise

With traditional tools, organizations often cannot apply granular custom rules, patterns and filters when searching their documents for instances of sensitive data patterns.

As a result, they often cannot find every instance of credit card numbers, Social Security numbers, email addresses, passwords, phone numbers, and the like that exist in documents within their network.

With Tanium, you will set filters, apply rules and rule conditions, and use patterns and pattern groups to find sensitive data patterns and combinations of patterns within your documents.

4. Proactively monitor your sensitive data for changes, anomalies and high-risk activities

With traditional tools, organizations often can perform only reactive scans of their sensitive data — after an incident is suspected— and these scans come back with stale, inaccurate and incomplete information.

As a result, teams often learn about large-scale data loss, theft, or misuse once it’s too late to resolve the issue and open themselves to business disruption, reputational harm, and millions of dollars in fines and damages.

With Tanium, you will proactively monitor for targeted files, folders and registries for the specific activities and changes that indicate potential issues are occurring — and receive accurate alerts in real time.

5. Fix data protection and privacy issues that you find without breaking compliance or creating excess network load

With traditional tools, when information security professionals discover a sensitive data protection issue, they must often copy and/or move those files, folders and registries to a central location to investigate and resolve the issue.

As a result, remediating issues often creates excess network load, violates regulations surrounding how data is copied and moved and builds a central “honeypot” of sensitive files that a cybercriminal can easily target.

With Tanium, you will act on sensitive data locally and perform remediation on the endpoint itself — without copying or moving the files — without creating significant network load or compliance and security risk.

6. Respond to data privacy requests and regulatory compliance audits in minutes

With traditional tools, organizations often lack an accurate, real-time inventory of what sensitive data lives in their environment and what that data is doing, and require days, weeks or months to collect this information.

As a result, many teams must scramble every time they receive a data privacy request or perform a regulatory compliance audit, and divert significant resources away from strategic projects to complete their response on time.

With Tanium, you will continuously monitor for relevant compliance data — such as PCI or HIPAA data — and perform ad hoc scans to collect accurate, complete and real-time data to respond to requests and audits in minutes.

7. Combine out-of-the-box content for common regulations with a flexible, extensible toolset

With traditional tools, organizations must deploy a different solution to monitor for compliance with each of the data privacy regulations they are subject to, and update or upgrade their toolset when new regulations enter the picture.

As a result, many teams are caught in a constant cycle of purchasing or extending their data compliance tools just to keep up with the ever-changing regulatory landscape.

With Tanium, you will gain out-of-the-box content for many regulatory frameworks — including GDPR, PCI, HIPAA, CCPA — and gain a flexible toolset that can extend to new requirements without buying another tool.

8. Unify your IT operations, security, compliance, risk and legal teams under a single source of truth

With traditional tools, internal teams that monitor and manage sensitive data often work from their own reports and solutions, and solve their own piece of the “sensitive data puzzle” from silos.

As a result, these teams often disagree on the current state of the environment, prioritize different risks to respond to and remediate and cannot validate the findings and efforts of other teams.

With Tanium, your teams can work from a shared dataset and platform that provides a single source of truth for scope data exposure and risk, and that combines sensitive data visibility and control workflows in a single console.

9. Combines sensitive data monitoring with other risk-reduction workflows

With traditional tools, isolated point solutions are needed for every risk-reduction workflow teams must perform.

As a result, organizations must manage an ever-expanding sprawl of tools — including their operations teams and their supporting infrastructure — just to keep their organization and its assets safe.

With Tanium, you will perform sensitive data monitoring from a single lightweight agent that can also perform myriad other risk-reduction use cases, including vulnerability management, patching and incident response.

10. Measurably improve your ability to manage sensitive data

With traditional tools, organizations struggle to answer basic questions about the sensitive data in their environment, such as “Where do I have sensitive data stored in my unmanaged endpoints?” “Which users have accessed sensitive files in the last 30 days?” and “Has any of my data been tampered with?”

With Tanium, organizations have reduced unauthorized change events per endpoint by 90%, reduced their time to identify data leakage by 95% and increased their discovery of unmanaged assets by 20%.

As one Tanium customer explained, “The real-time visibility Tanium gives use is a boon for the IT team and leadership. It allows us to report in real time with accurate numbers about something vital to the business.”

Another Tanium customer — a former CISO at a top-5 U.S. financial institution — put it even more bluntly. He said, “I can’t imagine anybody is excited about paying for Tripwire. I’m so happy I use Tanium instead.”

In sum: Tanium gives you every critical workflow and piece of real-time data that you need to create a real-time picture of the sensitive data in your environment and to make sure it stays in the right hands.

Bring Tanium to your organization

With traditional tools, you cannot perform effective sensitive data monitoring across your modern endpoint environment. But with Tanium, you will secure your data, prevent leakage, reduce risk, and maintain compliance — no matter how large and complex your environment is.

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Learn more about Tanium’s sensitive data monitoring solution and request a demo.