Can you tell us about your professional history and Tanium story?

I have been working in the world of Tanium for eight years now. I started my technical career over 20 years ago in desktop support, and moved up the ranks to security operations.

How did that path lead you to Tanium?

My first experience with Tanium was as a security engineer for a very large company in the travel industry. The company already had Tanium in place, although this was way before Tanium Threat Response was available.

I just remember the light bulbs going off when I first saw Tanium in action, seeing that it could give an accurate inventory of all the software in our environment. I couldn’t wait to find out more: How could I use it with the other security tools I was managing? What could Tanium allow us to see, which other tools couldn’t?

I eventually joined Tanium as an employee because I could see the power of the tool and wanted to learn all the best practices for using it in a corporate environment. I was hooked.

I was a director of technical account management at Tanium. In that role, I worked with a wide range of organizations to adopt and get the most of out their investments in the platform. I also learned a lot. When the opportunity arose to join Chuco, I was excited by the chance to take my client involvement one step further – with hands on keyboard, we can help organizations reap the benefits of using Tanium faster.

Can you share more about your role now as a senior consultant at Chuco?

I work directly with Chuco clients on a weekly basis, helping them use Tanium to address their security and business objectives.
One of the best parts of my job is getting to “re-live” time and again, the reaction of new users of Tanium —when the light bulb goes off, and they finally have that “Aha!” moment about what the platform can do for them and their organization.

Of course, when you first turn on Tanium, it can be a big shock. You suddenly see all the vulnerabilities and risks in your environment. I worked with one client that was shocked to discover it had many Windows servers with 400, and even 600 days of uptime — meaning they had not been rebooted and thus hadn’t been patched to address critical issues.

Is that an extreme or unusual example?

No, we often remind CIOs and CISOs that no organization is immune from vulnerabilities. These types of issues are often par for the course.

Everyone has been using the same endpoint management tools with the same limitations. Every company has critical patches outstanding since 2007. And many organizations are running antivirus and EDR software on desktop environments, that are not installed correctly or maintained poorly. The good news is that now you have Tanium, and this can be dealt with in minutes.

For IT operations teams, turning on Tanium can be overwhelming at first, because there is so much data available. People who are new to Tanium feel like they’re not sure where to start.

How does Chuco help?

Chuco comes in and we help teams prioritize and get to the heart of what they can do with Tanium. We like to go in and pursue a jointly-defined list of “quick wins”. As part of that, we’ll start by assessing their environment and making recommendations for what to focus on first. Often, we help our clients set up dashboards to make it easier for them to track the things they care about most.

I speak directly to CIOs and CISOs in regular status meetings. And I also work with engineers and IT teams, setting up best practices in Tanium, automating self-heal of other agents, helping them make sense of the data, and giving them context. SecOps teams often say they appreciate how quickly we can go in and help them generate reports that communicate what management needs to know.

Recently, Chuco launched a new “rapid deployment” service offering. It’s designed to help brand-new Tanium clients get up and running within an accelerated timeframe, so they can achieve results even faster.

You spoke earlier about education and training, how does that factor into your approach to client service?

We want to train clients to fish for themselves, or at least to the degree they want to. That often means training the in-house team on how to ask the right questions on the Tanium platform.

An example of this is going over what to do when notified of a critical zero day exploit. That includes using available resources like Tanium Community, learning how to find the sensors that you need, and filtering for what you care about.

When you’re dealing with the threat of the day, in the past, your desktop operations team had to go from workstation to workstation to find and mitigate vulnerabilities. With Tanium, you can do it all from one console, in seconds.

Overall, how would you describe working at Chuco?

I had always heard great things about Kevin Chu [president]. He has known Tanium since the early days and his passion for helping organizations succeed with Tanium is clear in everything he does. I knew going into this role that this would be a great fit, and it is satisfying to be part of such a committed team.

Working with Chuco, I get to help our clients hit the ground running with Tanium. Depending on the engagement, I can have my hands on the keyboard in the customer environment from Day One. It makes a world of difference. We don’t have to spend 30 minutes walking through how to set things up.

I help our clients set up reporting and patching, pointing out outdated software, generating compliance reports, and working with the data to help prove the point. With Tanium, reporting is no longer a time sink. Once our clients start seeing the improvement, once they see outcomes, then they are sold.

For me, it has been rewarding to help our customers catch up quickly with patch management, and respond to new threats, but also set up the framework to stay ahead of potential vulnerabilities in the future. Tanium is a game changer in endpoint management, and it’s a great feeling to help set up our clients for success.