Manufacturer Secures More Than 50,000 Endpoints With Tanium for Speed and Agility
A global manufacturer turned to Tanium as a Service to help manage and secure its nearly 60,000 endpoints, many of which were previously invisible to the company’s central IT team.
Securing more than 50,000 endpoints is a handful, and then some. That was the challenge facing a major manufacturer that operates factories and technical centers around the globe. With so many endpoints over such a large area, the company’s IT security team struggled to identify and troubleshoot every device and keep them securely updated.
That led to excessive administrative overhead as managers tried to identify endpoints, assess their risk level, and keep them patched. A veritable spider’s web of networks and switches didn’t make the job any easier. In fact, managing endpoints often meant overloading the central office’s Windows servers and network.
Clearly, a better, safer approach was needed. The manufacturer needed to keep its thousands of endpoints visible, up-to-date and secure. And do so in a way that would both ease the burden of the cybersecurity staff and go easy on the IT operations and security budgets.
Moving to the cloud
The manufacturer found its solution in Tanium as a Service (TaaS). TaaS offers the functionality of the Tanium on-premises platform, but it’s delivered as a cloud-based service via Amazon Web Services (AWS). One big advantage of this approach is that it requires zero customer infrastructure.
With TaaS, a company can use Tanium without having to maintain any application server software or any virtual or physical servers. What’s more, the Tanium core platform and related products are automatically configured and maintained, so the user can instead focus on managing its endpoints.
The manufacturer ordered a TaaS proof-of-concept in early 2020 and was so pleased with the results, it agreed to a full implementation in September of that year.
The company now runs a full complement of Tanium products, including Discover, Patch, Deploy, Asset, Threat Response, Comply and Enforce.
The manufacturer’s move to TaaS has eased many of its former endpoint headaches. Gone is the need for frequent administrative updates. Gone, too, are limits on the corporate network, as TaaS is limited only to what the cloud can handle (which is essentially limitless). Also gone is that spider’s web of networks and switches; now, the company doesn’t have to deal with that at all. That company unit has now been mandated to adopt TaaS. In fact, the company’s CEO has been so impressed by TaaS’s security advantages, he has mandated that Tanium will go on all of the company’s compatible endpoints, including manufacturing devices.
Essentially, every one of the manufacturer’s devices that runs a supported operating system will also run Tanium. One unexpected result of the manufacturer’s TaaS implementation has been the discovery of a large number of endpoints that were previously virtually invisible to the central IT team. There are enough of these newly discovered devices that the manufacture now needs to expand its TaaS license to cover them all. As they say, that’s a good problem to have.
Key benefits of Tanium
Fast updates: Replacing an older setup in which a full report could take weeks or even months to complete, TaaS helps the manufacturer identify and update vulnerable endpoints immediately.
Simple operation: Because TaaS is based in the AWS cloud, the manufacturer is free from both installing and operating any sort of infrastructure.
Safer systems: By giving the manufacturer comprehensive and centralized visibility into its tens of thousands of endpoints, TaaS helps the company lower its risk for security breaches of all kinds.
Find out why other customers partner with Tanium to manage and secure their endpoints.
