Tanium Receives New Funding, Upgrades Endpoint Security Platform

Tanium announced a new funding round and an updated platform for endpoint security defense. Tanium's Endpoint Platform 6.5 incorporates a patching capability.
Security vendor Tanium today announced that it has raised $52 million in a new round of funding, bringing its total financing to $142 million.Tanium builds an endpoint defense platform now being updated to version 6.5. Tanium's founders come from endpoint system management specialist BigFix, which IBM acquired in 2010.Orion Hindawi, co-founder and CTO of Tanium, said the new funding will help accelerate the company's growth as it continues to expand around the world. Tanium's current head count is 175, compared with 25 at the beginning of 2014, Hindawi said. By the end of 2015, he expects to have 600 employees, including engineering, sales and marketing professionals."We give our customers real-time endpoint data so they can see the current status of those assets and how they are changing," Hindawi told eWEEK. With the visibility into endpoints, the new Tanium Endpoint Platform 6.5 provides additional modules for control and security. The 6.5 release is about making the platform more modular and scalable, Hindawi said. "We have moved to an HTML5-based console that allows us to plug in modules," he said. "Prior to this release, we had a monolithic console that had to be compiled and then released, and now we have the ability to release different modules at different times and have them all interrelate."One of the modules available on Tanium's Endpoint Platform 6.5 is a patching capability. Multiple studies in recent months have identified the lack of proper patching as a primary cause of exploitation. Hewlett-Packard's 2015 Cyber Risk report found that 44 percent of breaches could be attributed to patched vulnerabilities that were between 2 and 4 years old.The visibility into endpoints is what makes the Tanium platform work well as a patch management tool, Hindawi said. A Tanium customer was able to go from 82 percent patch compliance to 99.7 patch compliance; that customer was able to see t hat when they pushed the button to patch, it worked, he said. "Patch management has typically been a disaster because there is so much latency in existing systems just to see if a patch process actually worked," Hindawi said. "By the time an organization finds out that it didn't work, they are being hit by more patches that they have to deal with."The Tanium platform enables organizations to interrogate the status of endpoints in seconds and then is able to make changes in seconds, Hindawi said. There is now an interface in the new console for handling patches that includes maintenance window configuration for scheduling when to deploy patches."The real problem that many organizations have is they just don't know what systems they own, let alone which ones are patched," Hindawi said.Investor Andreessen Horowitz led the latest financing round as well as a $90 million round for Tanium in June 2014.Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK an d InternetNews.com.