NEC launched its endpoint management program in 2002 but did not encounter Tanium until 2019, when it sought an integrated way to manage its roughly 13,000 endpoints outside Japan and address three major challenges: thorough IT asset management, clarifying what endpoints existed and where, and reducing the on-site workload of repetitive tasks such as patching. After a successful overseas rollout, NEC faced similar challenges at much larger scale within Japan—some 240,000 endpoints. Using the NIST Cybersecurity Framework to inventory issues and chart a path forward, NEC determined Tanium Cloud was the optimal solution and installed the agent on over 200,000 endpoints in just four months.

For NEC, one of the biggest benefits of Tanium is speed. Investigating endpoint applications for specific vulnerabilities used to take more than 24 hours; with Tanium, the same investigation now completes in just five minutes. Patching is faster too—Tanium has shortened patch delivery time drastically, and confirms deployment status, something NEC's previous tool could not do. By automating select tasks, Tanium has also reduced the workload of on-premises employees to less than 7 percent of the previous level, freeing them to focus on more strategic projects.

NEC has connected Tanium with ServiceNow to link critical asset and vulnerability information, enabling the early detection of dangerous endpoint vulnerabilities and cutting the time from detection to notifying the appropriate administrator by 85 percent. Tanium also helps NEC manage shadow IT: any device on the network can be detected even if Tanium is not installed on it, allowing NEC to identify who is managing the device and bring it under proper management. The CISO team has further built a cybersecurity dashboard on Tanium data to see the changing risk landscape and distinguish long-term issues from real-time emergencies.