Welcome to a New Blog Series on Improving IT Hygiene

Managing enterprise IT environments is becoming more and more complex. In this series, we’ll take a careful look at the core challenges that have stemmed from this growing complexity. Furthermore, we will highlight how focusing on fundamental IT hygiene can help you more effectively overcome these challenges.

In upcoming posts we’ll look at critical challenges facing IT organizations today. They are:

• Challenge #1 – Tool Proliferation
• Challenge #2 – Visibility Gaps and Bad Data
• Challenge #3 – Organizational Silos

These are the challenges that hamper an IT organization’s ability to improve overall IT hygiene. Let’s take this moment to define IT hygiene, a truly important factor in operating and securing today’s IT environments.

What is IT hygiene?

IT hygiene is the process of continuously identifying assets, risks and vulnerabilities across an environment and fixing them with speed and scale. It is a virtuous cycle that is fundamental to enterprise security and systems management. Focusing on IT hygiene can help prevent many of the breaches, outages and disruptions businesses fall victim to today.

Defining IT hygiene is one thing. Achieving it is another. IT hygiene requires comprehensive visibility and control. The visibility to uncover risk across an environment and the control to address that risk with swift remediating action. More simply put: Find it right away. Fix it right away. With this in mind, IT hygiene spans the following IT processes:

• Asset Discovery
• Asset Management
• Vulnerability Scanning
• Configuration Management
• Patch Management
• Software Deployment

In a manner of speaking, IT hygiene really is an end-to-end approach to nailing the basics of IT.

Consider, for a moment, these three realities: endpoint variety is expanding; networks continue to grow in size and complexity; and, security and compliance policies continue to evolve. IT teams must manage these forces while preventing disruptions and finding ways to advance their business. An extremely tall order.

For most organizations, the solution has been to dedicate more people, tools and processes towards these challenges. However, despite significant investment, IT teams still find themselves struggling to drive IT hygiene across endless tools, integrations and organizational silos.

This blog series will take a look at the core challenges preventing IT teams from improving IT hygiene. Further, we will outline how Tanium’s approach to IT hygiene can help teams more effectively identify and remediate risk across their environment. Please standby for the next installment of the Tanium IT hygiene Blog Series.

To learn more about how Tanium can help your organization drive IT hygiene, download our IT Hygiene Solution Brief.

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