Digital transformation comes with a cost — increased IT complexity

Digital transformation has long been a focus of government agencies of all sizes, and it’s changed how the government operates, making it more agile and responsive to the people it serves. But this transformation has come at a cost — a rambling web of software tools and applications, cloud infrastructures, and decentralized application services. And this complexity presents a big challenge to IT teams.

In tandem with digital transformation initiatives has been the rise of the remote workforce, making traditional network perimeters a thing of the past. Many IT resources now operate outside of an organization’s firewall and are vulnerable to cyber threats of all kinds. The result? A much larger and more varied attack surface.

Tackling complexity and the security risks it presents

As complexity has taken hold, IT organizations have armed themselves with a litany of tools to tackle their most pressing security challenges. A Forrester survey found that on average, organizations today use 20 or more tools from more than 10 vendors to secure and operate their environment. Many large organizations use upwards of 40 to 50 tools — all point solutions. This is tool proliferation in the extreme.

A point solution approach works — if it delivers the results an organization is looking for. However, when organizations suffer from outage after outage and critical vulnerabilities and patches go unresolved for months, the merits of a best-of-breed approach come into question.

Many CIOs believe the sheer number of tools in their organization limits — not enhances — the effectiveness of security and IT operations. But for most security teams, the point-solution approach has been the only option available

The tyranny of best of breed

Twenty years ago, IT management solutions came as legacy platforms. They provided unified functionality, and their architectures for monitoring and acting on the environment worked under the relatively limited requirements of that era. Many Federal government agencies are still using these tools as their main IT management engine today.

However, around 15 years ago, rapid changes in computing (advanced threats, increasing scale, IaaS, virtualization, remote-work, cloud) and the subsequent memos, executive orders and guidelines have driven requirements in functionality and coverage those platforms could not adequately deliver.

Enter the built-for-purpose approach. Federal organizations were forced to start buying point solutions to address the gaps, and every nuanced need, and every response to changes in the environment became more and more difficult to piece together across several vendor options.

But this approach has several drawbacks. Each tool offers different visibility and different data. Tools are often cost-prohibitively expensive for certain agencies to use, and when they are deployed, they are expensive to learn and maintain. They’re often not extensible to accommodate changes over time, so teams are stuck using tools that don’t quite meet their needs due to budget and political barriers.

Tool consolidation — the return of the platform approach

To address tool proliferation, IT leaders need to step back, set all their tools and biases aside for a moment and perform a tool audit.

1. Identify the results and capabilities your organization needs to deliver regardless of tools and technology.
2. Go through each tool individually and catalog the capabilities it provides.
3. Create a Venn diagram to see where overlap exists between these tools. The overlaps are your opportunities for consolidation.

This audit will help inventory your current state and start the process of tool consolidation via a platform approach.

With unified security operations platform, CIOs, CISOs and CTOs can:

• Monitor and optimize software needs to reduce unnecessary spending.
• Eliminate legacy solutions and reduce unnecessary point tools and the infrastructure required to support them.
• Unify endpoint management and security onto a single console.
• Rally your IT teams around instant, accurate, and actionable data to maximize efficiency and minimize risk.
• Proactively monitor and resolve end user performance issues to lessen the burden on IT support resources.
• Reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and the number of tickets to improve workplace productivity.
• Improve IT decision-making around critical software change initiatives.
• Smartly manage hardware lifecycles using historical data to assess the need for hardware refreshes.

Looking ahead

Remote work trends are here to stay. The need to manage and secure all types of endpoints (in and out of network) will only increase. So, it’s clear that with a distributed workforce, IT teams will continue managing and protecting endpoints physically outside an organization’s firewalls. A converged platform that yields 

visibility, control and trustworthy data to IT teams will only grow more critical in a hybrid work environment.

A converged platform can deliver measurable results, such as

• Reclaiming assets, eliminating point tools, and modernizing IT to reduce costs.
• Increasing team efficiency by offering an accurate set of data and automation to reduce manual and tedious tasks, and improve decision-making.
• Gaining greater visibility and control across teams to mitigate potential IT outages and their associated impact to the public.

Learn more about the benefits of Tanium’s Converged Endpoint Management (XEM) platform and the opportunity for reclaiming costs it can bring to your organization by requesting a Tanium ROI assessment.