More Tanium Magic

For a just over a year, Tanium Corporation has been impressing enterprise customers with its special brand of Tanium magic — the ability to instantly learn anything you need to know about the PCs, servers, VMs, and embedded devices such as ATMs and Point-of-Sale devices on your network. About nine months ago Andreessen Horowitz was offered the opportunity to partner with Tanium and the founders David and Orion Hindawi, and we could not be more impressed with the progress and growth of the company. This week Tanium is adding some more magic to an amazing product.

Growing and Scaling

The Tanium team has been hard at work on the platform and in creating a great company. It is worth sharing a little bit about the progress they have made in less than a year:

• Tanium is deployed on over 10,000,000 endpoints, with individual customers managing hundreds of thousands of endpoints.
• Tanium is in broad deployment in over half the Fortune 100.
• Tanium is rapidly growing (and hiring) with a particular focus on expanding internationally.
• Even with growth on every metric, Tanium has stayed a cash-generating and profitable business.

Tanium’s product magic is matched by the team’s amazing leadership and execution.

Reimagining Systems Management and Endpoint Security

When customers first see Tanium, they are blown away by the speed at which IT can learn what is going on with the endpoints on the network. Tanium’s capability to navigate, interrogate, and act on even the largest enterprise network in seconds is the magic that fires up customers –networks comprised of millions of endpoints made up of PCs, Servers, VMs, and embedded devices. This 15-second capability is the foundation of Tanium magic and is unprecedented for large scale environments.

Traditionally, enterprises deploy Systems Management (SM) platforms to control their environments. Prior to Tanium, even the state-of-the-art tools require immense investment in agents, logon scripts, policies, signature files, databases, dedicated infrastructure (servers and networking), and more, just to provide base level information. These tools frustrate end-users and CIOs alike by choking endpoints, burdening networks, and offering up information that is approximate at best and at worse irrelevant, because it is outdated.

Tanium surpasses the state-of-the-art in systems management, which you’d expect from founders whose previous company built the leading tools of this generation before being acquired by IBM. Not content to stop there, Tanium’s ambition is much greater than improving on their previous solution, even if it is already “10,000 times better.”

That ambition is based on an important observation regarding today’s challenges in enterprise security, particularly the realities faced by the nature of attacks. Malicious attacks are no longer brute force attempts to penetrate the network firewall or simply blunt viruses or malware that indiscriminately seize endpoints. We’re all aware that today’s attacks are multi-step, socially enabled or engineered, and by definition circumvent network-based and traditional end-point protection. We’ve seen that in all the recent breaches across Target, Home Depot, JP Morgan, Sony and more, including Anthem most recently.

In every case, once a breach becomes known, the most critical job of the security team is to scope the breach, identify compromised endpoints, and shut them down. Traditionally security teams relied on network-based management solutions since those have the fastest and most familiar tools. In practice, quickly identifying all the endpoints with an unpatched OpenSSL version or all that match a known indication of compromise, for example, look much less like network security efforts and more like endpoint challenges, historically the domain of systems management. The problem is that systems management tools were designed for an era when most of their work took place logging on or during off-hours “sweeps” of assets, with results gathered over the course of weeks.

CIOs recognize that having a systems management team using one set of tools that can barely keep up with traditional demands and having a security team using tools that are only focused on the network edge isn’t ideal by any measure. Systems management is now an integral part of incident detection and response. Conversely, security and protection require full knowledge and control of end-points. Neither set of existing tools deployed in most environments is up to the task.

Tanium has been working with customers from the CIO and CISO and throughout the management and response teams in enterprises to deploy Tanium as a frontline and first response platform that reimagines the traditional categories of systems management and endpoint security. In a world of unprecedented security risks, BYO devices, and ever-changing software needs nothing short of a rethinking of the tools and approaches is required.

Tanium is a new generation of security and systems management capabilities that meets two modern criteria:

1. Provide 15-second information on all endpoints. Open your browser, type in a natural language query, and know instantly every endpoint that meets a particular criteria or indication of compromise, IOC, (for example, running a certain process, recently modified system state matching a pattern, particular network traffic, or literally anything you can imagine asking the endpoint). Aside from instant information, the key new capability is being able to learn about any aspect of the running system even if it is something unforeseen or unplanned. Results are real-time, live, and refreshable instantly.

2. Remedy problematic situations immediately. Given the set of endpoints matching the criteria, take action immediately by shutting down endpoints, modifying the system configurations, quarantining devices, alerting users, or patching the appropriate modules, all in seconds rather than days. Aside from being able to immediately deploy the remedy, the key new capability is being able to implement any possible remedy across all endpoints, even within the largest networks in the world using minimal infrastructure.

The most innovative products are those that provide new ways of thinking about problems or new approaches that break down the traditional category boundaries. Tanium is such a platform, and that is why enterprises are so enthusiastic about what Tanium provides.

Shipping New Capabilities

This week Tanium is releasing some significant new capabilities that further the vision of a new category of product that serves the needs of both systems management and security professionals.

Tanium IOC Detect. Open to a wide variety of highly-regarded third-party threat intelligence data and indicators of compromise templates, Tanium takes this data and continuously seeks to identify endpoints at risk in real-time. Tanium is able to match the widest possible range of system attributes and patterns without downloading client-side databases or signature files. Security operations no longer needs to sift through all of the intelligence feeds manually or script signatures to feed into legacy systems management tools. Instead, Tanium makes it possible to detect and remediate threats immediately at massive scale.

Tanium Patch. Tanium transforms a process that’s error-prone and time-consuming with the ability to deploy patches across hundreds of thousands of endpoints in seconds, with 99%+ reliability and no scripting required by the IT team. Using two of Tanium’s key architectural elements, the communications layer and the data transport layer, patches are deployed and installed with unprecedented speed and unrivaled minimal impact on network infrastructure. Since many security breaches require updates to endpoints to truly remedy them, Tanium brings together the needs of both security and management processes.

Tanium Connect. Tanium integrates its 15-second data into third-party security and management tools to make those tools more accurate and actionable. For example, Tanium’s ability to quickly see anomalies on endpoints can be used to create alerts in security information and event management (SIEM) systems. Traditionally this data would be impossible to collect or would be routed through existing systems management infrastructures, which are labor intensive and high-latency data sources. Tanium Connect provides the security operations data required to ascertain the threat and, because the data is only seconds old, the team knows it is worthy of investigation.

These are just a few of the improvements to Tanium’s 6.5 platform available this week.

Looking Forward

Tanium’s magic innovation uniquely positions the company at the modern crossroads of systems management and security tools. Tanium’s platform reimagines these categories, while seamlessly working with existing infrastructure, and adds a new level of value and capability to forward-leaning IT teams.

Given this superb team, amazing growth, and unparalleled innovation, we could not be more happy than to lead a new round of investment in this wonderful company. Andreessen Horowitz is incredibly excited to be partnering with David, Orion, and the Tanium team, and I could not be more thrilled with continued service on Tanium’s Board of Directors.