The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed workforce dynamics from office-based locations to home working and its impact will be long-lasting.

A recent ZK Research Work From Home Study asked the question, “Once the stay-at-home orders are lifted, how long do you think it will take before a critical mass of your own organization’s office employees who are now working from home will be back to work at your company?”

Some  73% of respondents stated that the arrangement would be for at least three months with 38% stating 6 months or more. A small percentage forecast that the situation would continue for more than two years.

I am also expecting a permanent rise in working from home for an indefinite period of time. Prior to the outbreak, about 22% of employees worked remotely. That figure has significantly jumped to 53% during the stay-at-home period and currently sits at 46%. The study shows that about 42% of office workers will continue to work remotely even after they are invited to return to the office.

This creates a profound problem for information technology and security professionals as businesses are struggling to manage and secure ubiquitous endpoints. Even when the majority of workers were in the office, securing and managing worker’s computers was difficult. Moving them off the company network has made this task nearly impossible. Conversely, cyberattacks, phishing and malware have increased exponentially, raising risk levels and exposing the lack of effective patch management.

To address these issues, the unified endpoint management and security platform Tanium today launched Tanium as a Service or TaaS as it calls it, which is a software-as-a-service version of its solution to enable companies to achieve enterprise level security and IT control in highly distributed environments. For those unfamiliar with Tanium, the company has a real-time endpoint management product that gathers data from computers, servers and other connected devices and provides a common data set that can be leveraged by security and IT professionals.

These integrated capabilities have enabled leading companies to bring security and IT operations together. Having a single source of truth can align the two teams and provide a complete view of the environment bringing visibility, in real time, to blind spots that create risk or application problems. This lets Tanium customers make better-informed decisions, to act and react quickly when dealing with disruptive events.

Although Tanium has been used as an on-premises solution, TaaS offers the full functions of the Tanium platform delivered as a fully managed, cloud-based service for customers that prefer this consumption model. TaaS provides enterprise-grade security and IT operations visibility and control across complex distributed environments.

With its cloud-hosted and cloud-delivered model, customers can perform important IT operations, risk, and security tasks with zero infrastructure and zero overhead, regardless of the number or geographic location of endpoints, or the amount of data being collected. Using the “Intelligent Edge” approach, organizations and government agencies can secure and manage every endpoint, everywhere at speed and scale, without the need to deploy additional agents or infrastructure.

In the legacy model of enterprise systems management, more off-premises endpoints require more on-premises infrastructure. Tanium’s Intelligent Edge approach enables endpoints to answer questions quickly and directly, vastly reducing data movement and storage requirements.

Cloud-delivered Tanium enables customers to get started quickly. In a briefing with the company, Tanium told me in only about 10 minutes customers can log into the system and start using it. There are other cloud-based endpoint management and security tools, but Tanium is unique in a couple of ways.

The first is what I had mentioned before in that it addresses both security band and IT endpoint issues. The second, and this is notable, is that Tanium’s approach provides flexibility, teaching the endpoint to answer questions on its own. Instead of moving mostly uninteresting metrics and events around, Tanium transmits strong signals of actual problems.

Additionally, Tanium protects customer data by implementing teach TaaS customer with their own unique TaaS instance isolated at the cloud virtual private compute layer. That means no customer data ever co-mingles with any other customer data. Also, all customer data is encrypted at rest with encryption keys stored in a hardware security module and is unique to each customer instance.

In comparison with products such as Crowdstrike and Splunk that send all data over VPN links back to the organization’s data center, Tanium is much more network-friendly. Tanium is highly complementary to Splunk and its approach can help minimize the floods of data into log analysis systems, by replacing raw data with cooked answers.

In some sense, what Tanium has created is the world’s largest Hadoop database where little bits of data are left on the computers at home but is still treated as a single database for artificial intelligence algorithms to inspect. This “Intelligent Edge” approach, as Tanium calls it, enables companies to secure and manage every endpoint at high speed and scale without having to deploy a plethora of agents or additional infrastructure. In an era of woring from home, having to deploy software physically on remote endpoints can be a nonstarter for many organizations.

Tanium as a Service uses the data to deliver the following capabilities:

• Endpoint intelligence, which enables the device to request administrator attention only when the need arises. This methodology optimizes how data is retrieved from and delivered to endpoints, increasing speeds and efficiency and reducing the amount of unnecessary data being moved.
• Threat detection and response uses the intelligence at the endpoint to provide real time visibility and detection of events that compromise the endpoint. However, unlike endpoint detection and response tools that can only see the endpoint, Tanium has a broader view of all endpoints and can automate the responses to the endpoint event.
• Proactive endpoint management quickly finds unpatched desktops and servers and automates the remediation of vulnerabilities without overloading the network with unnecessary data.

Many people ask me about the “new norm.”  My response is that businesses will always go through phases of upheaval where people’s office attendance will be reflected by unforeseen circumstances. The “new norm” is merely a reflection of the “abnormal.”

IT professionals need to be prepared that any disruption in management and security will increase complexity. Tanium as a Service gives companies of all sizes the visibility it needs to manage and secure endpoints better and is designed for a world where the home is the “New Edge.”

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

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