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"What do you have, what's it doing and should it be?" were popular questions at Tanium Converge 2019 as we talked with customers about the visibility and security they need to make business decisions. WWT co-sponsored a booth at the conference with Cisco, where we had a chance to talk with attendees about their challenges and the integration of Tanium with Cisco's Identity Services Engine (ISE).

Partnerships that provide greater visibility

This was my fourth time at Tanium Converge, and it was great to spend time with our customers and partners. There were impressive speakers on the main stage, including Joseph Blankenship from Forrester who talked about customer challenges and how solutions like Tanium can help. Four-star General Stan McChrystal discussed leadership and how to make teams work better together. 

Customers talked about the outcomes from using the Tanium platform, but there were also hands-on technical labs to test out Tanium and its modules. Even if you missed out on the demonstrations at this year's conference, you can still test out the technology in our Tanium Proving Ground Lab.

Tanium partner program

This year, Tanium held its first ever partner summit and welcomed partners from all over the world (including WWT). Co-CEOs Orion Hindawi and Fazal Merchant talked about the Tanium vision, mission and roadmap. It was a great session with honest and transparent dialogue, along with a sneak peak of their exciting direction for the future. 

Tanium is building a strong team. They have added a new Chief Revenue Officer, Thomas Stanley from NetApp, and Tom Hermann as the Global Vice President for Alliances & Channels as they continue to grow. 

Tanium Partner Advantage, a new partner program, will be available to Tanium partners in the first quarter of the company's fiscal year 2020 and will feature: 

  • training and enablement to ensure high skill levels;
  • a personalized portal experience customized for each partner employee and their role in the partnership; and
  • a rewards-based approach to partner progression with no prohibitive thresholds around training and other measurements.

The WWT and Tanium partnership has expanded and grown over the years. We map customer challenges to Tanium solutions to drive customer outcomes. We now provide WWT Tanium Delivery Services, which help customers operationalize and gain ROI quickly from their investment in Tanium — whether they are a new Tanium customer or have had the Tanium platform for years. 

WWT optimizes and integrates Tanium in a customer's tools ecosystem to drive the outcomes they desire such as increased visibility, better patching, increased security/compliance and cost savings.

WWT and Cisco: Better together

Along with our co-sponsorship, WWT's Jordan Hildebrand presented on how to integrate Tanium and Cisco ISE together to maximize your investments in the "Maximizing Investments — Cisco ISE and Tanium: Better Together" session, which was standing room only. Jordan talked about the Cisco ISE PxGrid integration with Tanium and how our Tanium Delivery Services can operationalize your deployment and maximize your investments.

Security and IT operations teams aren't working together

One of the themes of the Tanium Converge 2019 was how security and IT ops teams aren't working together, a theme with which Tanium worked with Forrester on a joint study.

"Raise your hand if you feel your security and IT operations teams work well together? Anyone? Anyone, at all?" was a question asked to the main stage audience.

And no one raised their hand because these teams are not working together. It's causing security and operations challenges that are putting businesses at risk. Shouldn't we all be operating off the same data to secure and manage the infrastructure? We've helped customers do this in executive briefings and workshops aimed to solve customer challenges — but also to bring customer teams together.

Tanium is a technical platform that can bring these teams together around data and also integrate solutions in a tools ecosystem to maximize the ROI of that data. Again, WWT can help. We provide a Security Tools Rationalization Workshop to drive less tools, more integrations and automation. 

Just get the basics right: SCCM and BigFix

Tanium's Orion Hindawi stated that if a company is not doing the basics right (like patch management and visibility), then it doesn't make sense to move onto the more complicated stuff.  

Hindawi also talked about how IBM selling BigFix to HCL has created a lot of opportunities for Tanium and that recent moves by Microsoft to combine SCCM and InTune and charge for this solution has lead to more conversations about Tanium. When he discussed SCCM and its challenges, it confirmed many of my earlier thoughts on Tanium and SCCM.

Tanium 7.4 platform updates

Tanium announced their next version of the Tanium platform — Tanium 7.4 Platform — with some new features and updates below.

  • Improved console load time, increased usability and easier access
  • Expansion of modules, content and better workflows between modules
  • Numerous user experience updates that allow security and operations practitioners to make decisions based on the rich data provided by Tanium
  • Module level RBAC: Additional level of granularity for RBAC extending it into each module, enabling specific features to be isolated into defined content sets
  • Protocol enhancements: Protocol 315 that is extensible and upgradeable while still maintaining backward compatibility and Protocol 315 which is an overhaul of the Tanium Security model across all components (seamlessly rotate keys, add/remove trust relationships with ease)
  • Better usability within the Tanium Console or via a rich set of new APIs
  • Personas: A feature designed to help users maintain focus and allow the configuration of what users can see and do within Tanium (a unique set of privileges tailored to a specific task, rather than a person)
  • Computer group enhancements and filter groups: Capability to configure a computer group as a management group or a filter group, or as both (allows module administrators the ability to create and manage computer groups themselves with filter groups)
  • Asset tool tips: Embedded asset tooltips in an effort to streamline workflows and investigation efforts

Tanium innovations

Some additional Tanium innovations that are being worked on were introduced below.

  • The new Tanium GUI prototype looks awesome and provides a business centric view of your environment — what's good, what's bad and how to fix it.
  • Tanium Discovery added a feature to integrate with AWS to push clients to EC2 instances. More cloud vendor/provider integrations are coming in future releases.
  • Tanium Client Management is an automated and streamlined Tanium Client deployment feature to get Tanium Client out in a more automated way, without needing other third party systems for deployment.
  • Tanium is focused on sensor schema improvements, better threat intelligence and log streaming in the coming quarter(s)!
  • Tanium Enforce is a new Tanium module coming in the first half of 2020. It's focused on Windows and MacOS targeted policy enforcement and configuration reporting, which utilizes Windows Administrative templates and MacOS user profile management.
  • Google Backstory integrations feed Tanium data to Google Backstory in a more real-time stream.

What's next?

We had a great time and learned a lot at the Tanium Converge 2019 conference and want to thank Cisco for co-sponsoring with us. WWT would also like to thank Tanium for the partnership now and going forward. 

We're already looking forward to next year!

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