I spent a good portion of my career focused on managing and deploying Windows devices. Since most organizations have a lot of these, it made sense for most orgs to have teams dedicated to care and feeding of only these Windows devices. But there’s a lot of additional diversity in organizations today — and generally fewer people overall to keep them all secure, up to date, and properly configured.

So there are certainly advantages to being able to manage all of your devices — laptops, desktops, workstations, servers — with a single tool. Since joining Tanium just over a year ago, I’ve been exposed to a lot of these platforms and am impressed with how Tanium supports all of them (today, not at some future date), as documented here. Even the summarized list is extensive:

• Windows client, version 7 and above
• Windows Server, versions 2008 R2 and above
• macOS, versions 10.10 and above
• Linux (Debian, Redhat, CentOS, SUSE, Ubuntu, Oracle, Amazon) (too many versions to list)
• IBM AIX and Sun Solaris

From a functionality perspective, you can leverage the typical management capabilities for each platform:

• Software deployment (using Tanium Deploy)
• Patching / update management (using Tanium Patch — MacOS support was just released)
• Settings enforcement (using Tanium Enforce)
• Asset reporting (using Tanium Asset)
• Endpoint performance management (using Tanium Performance)
• Device discovery (using Tanium Discover to ensure that you are actually managing all of your devices)

And that’s on top of the core platform capabilities (provided by Tanium Interact) to get real-time information from all your devices: you formulate the question, Tanium gathers the answers in seconds. (There are also a suite of security features, but I’m an IT ops guy, not a SecOps guy, so I won’t even try to describe those.)

As I mentioned in my previous Tanium 101 post, you can easily try this out yourself leveraging our cloud-based Tanium-as-a-Service offering. No on-premises servers of any kind are required.

Over the coming months, I’ll probably spend some time diving into each of the capabilities above. For now, I’ll leave you with a picture of the end user experience for the new MacOS patching capability, which is being used on my MacBook Pro to encourage me to restart: