The often overlooked entry points that leave businesses exposed to cyber threats

Are businesses doing enough to prevent cyberattacks? In the past year, cybercrime spiked by 400% as organizations and governments underwent digital transformations, leaving them increasingly vulnerable to cyber threats.

It isn’t that businesses haven’t been doing their due diligence, however.

“Companies have always tried to protect themselves,” says Alvin Tan, regional vice president of Tanium, an endpoint management and security platform. “But the computing landscape is a complex one made up of endpoints and networks that transmit data. Because all things enter these endpoints, looking after them is crucial to protecting the crown jewels of an organization.”

Endpoints are devices such as laptops, servers, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure that communicate with the network to which they are connected. When these are compromised, they act as potential entry points for hackers.

Visibility is crucial

The trouble begins when businesses lose visibility of these endpoints, which can happen easily whenever an employee joins or leaves a company or works remotely, or with the introduction of new assets and hardware.

Photo credit: Giu Vicente via Unsplash

“A dynamic and distributed workforce creates a fluid environment, making it extremely difficult for organizations to have a clear view of their environment,” Tan explains.

To ensure their security, businesses have long looked to multiple solutions to protect themselves from different kinds of cyberattacks – only to face the problem of endpoint bloating, as one solution is added on top of the next. This often results in a lack of visibility and the need for more manpower in order to make sense of an organization’s database of assets, as well as the correlating events that had led to its present situation.

“As an organization’s environment grows, it relies on software that trawls its endpoints to gather data in order to detect an attack,” notes Tan. “However, not all the data returned may be relevant. The system needs a certain amount to get useful insights, but when there is too much data, a company could easily lose weeks of time making sense of all of it.”

This paradigm drove Tanium’s founding in 2007. In fact, the endpoint management and security platform had been conceived by one of its founders, David Hindawi, who drew from his experiences while running device management service BigFix.

In 2010, the firm was sold to American multitech firm IBM, and later to IT platform HCL Technologies for US$1.8 billion.

“While the BigFix solution was a very good one, [Hindawi] realized the solution never had true visibility of all the endpoints at any point in time,” Tan shares. “With Tanium, he made sure to have a super communication highway to reach these endpoints fast and with instant visibility – even if that endpoint is located on a ship and can only be reached via satellite signals.”

Last October, Tanium raised US$150 million in a private equity round led by existing investors including Fidelity Management & Research Company, taking its present-day valuation to more than US$9 billion. This came on the back of the endpoint management and security firm’s partnership with cloud computing SaaS firm Salesforce in June 2020 and an investment from its strategic VC arm Salesforce Ventures that same month.

Timing matters

Tanium’s ability to offer its users full visibility and control of their endpoints in real time – as well as to identify, protect, detect, respond to, and recover from threats in seconds – is what sets it apart from its competitors. Achieving this goes back to the company’s building block: a patented technology called the self-organizing communication orbit, which took some five years to develop.

An exterior shot of the Tanium building in Emeryville, California. / Photo credit: Geekwire

“Our building block has the ability to let you ask a question about your environment and receive an answer in seconds, no matter how big your environment is,” shares Tan. “There are many recommended actions built into the product so businesses can make decisions in a precise manner. If a company needs to take a new type of action, all it takes is for us to script that new action, which allows them to react faster to any emerging situation and scale for up to millions of endpoints.”

According to the regional VP, this building block gives Tanium an edge by offering its users a “heightened situational awareness” – the ability to identify issues in an environment within seconds or minutes.

“I once took eight months to deploy protection for 30,000 to 40,000 endpoints at a financial institution in Singapore while working at a former company,” Tan says. “With Tanium, we’ve deployed protection for 100,000 endpoints in just a month.”

Trimming the excess

The company’s efficiency lies in the fact that it omits the method of “hooking” – that is, altering or augmenting parts of an operating system – when deploying its solution for a business. Instead, Tanium uses its building block to determine the number of endpoints located within an environment and the best course of action to detect and respond to an issue, such as by identifying and fixing vulnerabilities or deficiencies in the system.

In the long run, this helps reduce operational costs, time, and manual labor, as well as cut out unused or underused software. This is quite unlike traditional endpoint management solutions, which may employ heavy architecture and manpower to set up and maintain servers.

“Over the years, companies have learned that you can’t trust any endpoint,” Tan observes. “A hacker who assumes the identity of an endpoint or a breached user can move laterally through an organization. And so we look at the endpoint as the final place to enforce all of the policies to ensure that a business is in good shape.”

A key challenge for the wider cybersecurity industry, however, is staying a step ahead of cyber criminals who constantly find new means of bypassing existing lines of defense. Given that many breaches are the result of unpatched systems or the failure to properly implement security controls, businesses must prioritize cyber hygiene.

“Today, the biggest fear for businesses is not knowing that they have been breached,” says Tan. “In cyber defense, there is no foolproof means of preventing these attacks. For hackers, there’s always going to be a way in. The question is, how fast can you discover them and remediate the situation? Having visibility and control over every endpoint in real time and being able to address these gaps quickly have given businesses added agility.”

While the cybersecurity industry has a framework to guide businesses on how to better prevent and respond to cyberattacks, the Tanium VP believes that endpoint visibility and control are the first steps in building an organization’s defense parameters.

“With the right endpoint solution, a company has better control over its environment and can confidently take action knowing that they’re fixing the right problem with precision,” Tan observes. “This ultimately helps them save on costs over time.”

Tanium transforms how organizations manage and secure their endpoint devices. Its platform unifies security and IT operations teams with a single view of critical endpoint data in real time so organizations can make informed decisions to minimize disruptions to the business. Find out more by visiting the Tanium website.

This content was produced by Tech in Asia Studios, which connects brands with Asia’s tech community. Learn more about partnering with Tech in Asia Studios.