Tanium
More info
- Creator
- David Hindawi, Orion Hindawi
- Released
- 2007
- Type
- Security company
A platform for asking a question of a few hundred thousand computers and getting the answer in seconds rather than days.
Father and son David and Orion Hindawi had already built BigFix, which IBM bought in 2010, when they founded Tanium in 2007. The trick was architectural: rather than every client reporting to a central server, clients on the same network form a chain and pass queries and answers along to each other. That makes "which machines have this file?" across an entire enterprise an almost instant question.
It is used for patching, asset inventory and incident investigation. In 2017 the company drew criticism for demoing the product against a hospital's live network without the hospital knowing, which was at least a vivid illustration of how much the tool can see.