Boy — I was somewhat surprised last week to learn that a good number of Tanium customers are still using 6.5, despite the fact that 7.0 was released 9 months ago (even more surprised and dismayed at some folks still using 6.2). I was also surprised that I was unable to find a good article that explained the benefits from moving to 7.0.
In no particular order, here are some pretty solid reasons to push past your company’s crazy, outdated change policies and move to 7.0 immediately.
1. GOODBYE, FLASH!
Tanium 7.0 fully removes Adobe Flash, and that’s all I need to say. Easy peasy! And I think pretty much every Tanium engineer and customer sighed finally when this was finally done.
As a secondary benefit for all of you HTML5 fans, you can nerd out over Developer Tool access. Almost all of the functionality of the Console is accomplished through the Tanium API.
And no, I couldn’t help myself — I had to post the Flash comic book image to the right.
2. EASIER CONTENT UPDATING
In the past, Tanium customers had very little (basically none) notification that there was updated content. In order to know about critical updates, you had to rely on your Technical Account Manager. And, while I’m a firm believer in the awesomeness of the TAM process, this was frankly not a tenable approach to keeping Tanium customers aware of critical updates. To top things off, customers began using the Tanium platform for the fast-paced, ever changing cybersecurity landscape, which requires even more attention.
So, one of the large directives for the platform and product engineering teams (make no mistake, this was a big deal) was to create a more seamless way of updating not only Tanium content (i.e., Sensors, Packages, Saved Questions, Scheduled Actions and Dashboards), but also Tanium product modules. Once a deployment gets to 7.0, you no longer have to haphazardly deploy either content type, and you can easily see when anything is out of date and could use an update (still waiting on better notification, though):
3. UX IMPROVEMENTS
And no, I’m not even focusing this reason on the reduction in red (see image below), though maybe I should be and just leave it at that and move on to #4.
But in addition to the astronomically better design (way to go Doug and Jaime), the Tanium Console became way more intuitive. I knew this back in May when the new version of the platform launched, but I really knew it after taking 6 months off from looking at anything related to Tanium. After a very long hiatus, I was able to immediately dive into the Console and give demos and training sessions without even blinking. More specifically, here are a couple of examples of improvements:
First, the Console’s Question Builder is built as it should have been built from day 1. It separates the two halves of a Tanium Question and literally explains what each does.
It really doesn’t get much easier than what you see above. I’ll spell out the anatomy of a Tanium Question in a separate post (this is warranted — everyone who touches a Console should understand this), but at a high level, the first half of the question specifies the data you want back, and the second half specifies which machines should answer. This is hopefully easy to undersatnd, but this concept can get lost with all the talk of a magical Google-like parser for the enterprise (you guessed it, a topic for yet another future post).
A second example of a UX improvement is drill down. This one isn’t evident unless you really use the Console a lot for deep investigations. In pre-7.0 Consoles, the viewable screen real estate for the resulting drill down Tanium Question gets smaller and smaller as you ask more drill down questions. With 7.0, this was finally addressed, and drill down simply extends down the page, with no reduction in viewable screen space. Simple, but important as you begin to use Tanium more.
4. GENERAL SECURITY, PERFORMANCE, AND STABILITY IMPROVEMENTS
Since its inception, the Tanium platform has seen improvements to these areas with every major release. The move from 3.x to 4.x was a gigantic leap across all three, and although 6.5 is a fairly stable build of Tanium (seriously, people — get off of 6.2 already), 7.0 is probably the biggest improvement yet for these three areas. These areas were a prime objective for the engineering teams for a good 12 months, and it shows. And at this point it’s been available for 9 months, and some of the largest environments in the world have verified the gains in security, performance, and stability. Stop being stubborn and get to it!
So what else? Hopefully there are some experienced customers, TAMs, engineers, and UX experts that are reading this. I’m sure I missed some goodies :).