Prevention is the Cure: How to Resolve Incidents Before They Occur

Why we need a new approach to endpoint management 

By: Michael Martins, VP Partnerships, Tanium

Global organizations are spending more money than ever on cybersecurity. The latest estimate put this outlay at an average annual sum of $5.3 million, up 250% since 2019. Yet, at the same time, 85 percent of Canadian companies experienced at least one cyberattack in 2021. And some ransomware groups are making hundreds of millions by exploiting gaps in protection.

The challenge is that CISO funds are often directed to the latest point solution, which only addresses a small part of the problem. Stitched together, these tools leave plenty of coverage gaps for threat actors to exploit. And they often deliver stale, incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate data to IT decision-makers. Organizations are left flat-footed, in continuous fire-fighting mode.

How do we solve this problem? By going back to basics and doing things right. That means rallying IT ops and security teams around a single platform and a single source of truth. It means identifying every single endpoint asset and its status at all times. And it means taking critical actions across the entire estate in seconds — optimizing cyber hygiene to prevent critical incidents from occurring and supporting rapid response when problems appear.

Shining a light on the endpoint

You can’t protect what you can’t see. But in an era of rapid digital transformation, the shadows have never loomed larger over enterprise IT environments. By some estimates, the pandemic has accelerated this IT modernization drive by several years. Organizations invested en masse in remote working laptops, doubled down on cloud infrastructure, and backed their DevOps teams to innovate their way out of trouble.

The challenge is that these same initiatives exposed them to greater cyber risk, expanding the digital attack surface and those critical visibility and coverage gaps. When the world stayed home, threat actors got to work exploiting distracted remote workers, unpatched devices and misconfigured cloud systems. A survey conducted by Tanium found 90% of global CXOs reported a surge in cyberattacks at the start of the crisis. Many (43%) encountered patching challenges when faced with updating personal employee devices.

Taking control

Be in no doubt, whether it’s a corporate desktop, a home working laptop, a container, virtual machine or cloud server, the endpoint is where modern business takes place today. It’s also where the risk of data loss and disruption is greatest. And where visibility and control have never been more important.

Yet too many organizations are laboring with incomplete data about their endpoint environment, which may be days or weeks old. They’re running an average of over 40 discrete security and operations tools to manage this mess, perpetuating information silos and visibility gaps. It makes it next to impossible to answer the critical questions IT and security bosses need to effectively support continuous risk management:

• How many endpoints do I have?
• What applications are running on each of my endpoints?
• Are my endpoints and applications fully patched, updated and properly configured?
• Do we have proper controls around admin access on all of our endpoints?

Sounds simple. Unfortunately, getting answers to these questions in near-real time is beyond most organizations.

Why XEM?

If they’re not able to answer these fundamental questions, organizations will always struggle to secure the attack surface, mitigate business risk and enhance operational resilience. This is where converged endpoint management (XEM) comes into play. It lives at the intersection of IT operations, security and risk management, providing a single, unified platform for teams to collaborate around.

Using Tanium’s unique linear chain architecture, XEM supports optimized decision-making by delivering the answers IT teams need to any questions they have within seconds. That means:

• Visibility. Complete, accurate and real-time insight into every managed or unmanaged endpoint in the network.
• Control. Empowers users to take critical actions such as patching across the cloud, on-premises or hybrid estate in seconds, with minimal network impact.
• Trust. Delivers a single source of truth from complete, high-fidelity endpoint data to break down silos between IT teams.

With the power of XEM, organizations can continually manage and remediate any insecure or misconfigured endpoints, support rigorous compliance requirements and minimize their cyber risk. When incidents do occur, they can react with speed and precision to contain threats and find and fix the root cause.

Successful defense requires understanding detailed posture information of every device in your organization, it requires the ability to make decisions fast, and it requires the ability to execute on those decisions at enterprise scale. The IT security and operations teams that are consistently winning the battle against massive IT disruption have two things in common:

1. They have access to accurate device details in seconds, and
2. They have the ability to instantly affect change across every device they own, no matter where on Earth.

Learn the 5 most important questions that successful security and operations teams are able to answer in seconds, and by answering these questions they are able to resolve most security and operational incidents before they ever happen.

To learn more about how to resolve security and operation incidents before they happen, attend Tanium’s presentation, The Devil is in the Details – 5 Keys To Resolving Incidents Before They Happen, at Camp Secure Sense on Day 1 at 11:00am in the Idea Loft!

Successful defense requires understanding detailed posture information of every device in your organization, it requires the ability to make decisions fast, and it requires the ability to execute on those decisions at enterprise scale. The IT security and operations teams that are consistently winning the battle against massive IT disruption have two things in common:

1. They have access to accurate device details in seconds, and
2. They have the ability to instantly affect change across every device they own, no matter where on Earth.

Learn the 5 most important questions that successful security and operations teams are able to answer in seconds, and by answering these questions they are able to resolve most security and operational incidents before they ever happen.

Camp Secure Sense is the leading IT Security Networking Event in Canada for the information technology leaders some of North Americas largest corporations. Register now to join decision makers and the Secure Sense team this year on September 28th & 29th.