Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Tanium?

Tanium is surging. This once under-the-radar cybersecurity player is fast becoming a key force in the Asia-Pacific market, assisting some of the region's largest institutions as they contend with rapidly growing digital estates and complex endpoint challenges.

Speaking on the 10 Minute Ike James podcast, Alex Hooper, Director of Technology Alliances and Partners for Southern Asia at Tanium, outlined how the firm has transformed from a niche endpoint security brand to a comprehensive platform now used by banks, government bodies, insurers, and health care providers.

"Tanium's actually been around for quite some time," Hooper said. "But because of the area of security and where it's sort of fitted into, it's not one of those household names just yet." Yet, that is changing quickly. "Its primary focus and its evolution came from endpoints and protecting endpoints - so the desktops, servers, things of that nature - but doing it in a way that's faster than anything I've seen personally in the marketplace, with full visibility across every endpoint in an estate."

This visibility and speed, Hooper argued, is increasingly critical "with the current trends in the market with Covid and things of that nature but also in terms of the speed, scale and visibility customers need to go and manage estates as they continue to grow with a big push into IoT and into sort of growth of endpoints."

The numbers reflect that demand. The company now has roughly 2,000 employees globally. In Asia's southern region alone, Tanium has nearly doubled its team in just four months, growing to 45 staff locally. "That growth is skyrocketing at the moment because of the demand and need for these solutions in market," Hooper said.

Tanium is traditionally seen as a cybersecurity solution, but Hooper emphasised that its remit is more expansive. "Tanium is a platform approach to endpoints… What we see with these platforms, and Tanium is one of them, is that the use case around cybersecurity comes because it's got the ability to go out to 500,000 endpoints and, in real time, collect data in 14 seconds."

That sort of speed is impressive, but perhaps even more significant is the breadth of visibility Tanium achieves. "You can't have a situation where we only see 10 or 50 or 60 percent of the estate," Hooper explained. "Cybersecurity really fits into that niche quite nicely with regards to the solution and what it solves."

Yet, Tanium goes beyond security alone. The company is participating in the ecosystem alongside major players such as ServiceNow and Splunk, feeding valuable, real-time endpoint telemetry to enhance basic IT operations. "The tech alliances bring another level to that where we're enhancing things like IT operations through CMDB [Configuration Management Database] data enrichment… So when we're talking about the data those other platforms are using, having real-time telemetry from the end point means that we can enhance those workflows. I see it not only as an IT security platform but feeding into IT operations and other areas within IT," he said.

The integration with other solutions is a key point for many businesses, with Hooper giving the example of integrating with ServiceNow. "Say your laptop is misbehaving performance wise - when you raise a ticket for IT to help you, you would then normally wait for an agent to check that and see what's happening. As part of that ticket-raising process, we would be able to send telemetry back to ServiceNow to say, hang on, are you running the latest version of Zoom? Have you rebooted your machine recently? And create a workflow to deflect that case from the agents and then potentially take remediation action all the way through."

This isn't mere theory - Tanium's platform is put to work at some of the market's most influential institutions. "Within the region, we have one of the top four banks… we're in the government federal space as well in a big way, and we're working with several large agencies in the federal space," Hooper said. "Insurance companies and healthcare companies as well, that seems to be really where our traction has been."

Globally, Tanium claims an even broader footprint. "We're in more than 50 percent of the top 100 Nasdaq organisations, we're in multiple of the military branches in America," Hooper said.

Though Tanium serves companies of all sizes, Hooper acknowledged that its sweet spot is larger organisations, given the complexity of managing tens of thousands of endpoints at scale. "The smaller organisations they don't struggle as much with the endpoint problem because they're not dealing with 60,000 staff or something of that nature," he explained. "It's not to say we don't scale down to that, it's just that the real issue that those larger organisations are facing are easily addressed by Tanium."

For those interested in seeing the platform in action, Hooper highlighted how readily companies could trial it - either through cloud-based proof-of-concept or traditional on-premise installations. "We do have on-premise options as well… but if you wanted to get your hands dirty with it then that's a quick way to get started," he said.

Beyond the technology, Hooper was keen to highlight Tanium's people-focused culture as a key differentiator. "I think we've really got a great culture and organisation where we all work together to try and help customers to overcome their challenges and I think it's a very approachable company. Based on my experience across multiple vendors, the culture here is incredible as to the desire to help organisations," he said.

As Tanium's rapid growth continues, especially in Asia-Pacific, that attitude could prove to be its most valuable asset. As Hooper put it: "The culture here is incredible as to the desire to help organisations."