New alliance to assist IT security teams
Security firm Palo Alto Networks and entered into a partnership with security and systems management company Tanium, an alliance that the companies say will transform the effectiveness, accuracy, and speed by which large, distributed organisations prevent, detect, and respond to cyberthreats.
"Given the speed and sophistication of modern cyberattacks, integrated and automated prevention technologies are of the utmost essence," says Chad Kinzelberg, SVP of business and corporate development at Palo Alto Networks. "Security teams are overwhelmed with the flood of alerts coming in from a variety of tools, each monitoring a different aspect of the network.
Kinzelberg says most large organisations commonly have hundreds of thousands of endpoints to secure and manage, and some security teams can't keep pace because their tools are either too slow, provide limited visibility, or lack the integration required to quickly prevent new threats and respond as they are detected.
In response, Tanium and Palo Alto Networks have entered into an exclusive agreement to provide an integrated offering that automates and accelerates the otherwise manual and time-consuming process of threat detection and incident response, Kinzelberg explains.
He says Palo Alto Networks is changing the economics of cyber attacks by delivering a natively integrated platform that brings breach prevention capabilities across distributed networks, including mobile devices and cloud-based services.
Initial efforts of the alliance will be focused on the integration of Tanium with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, its cloud-based threat prevention service that automatically detects unknown, malicious activity and quickly prevents threats before an enterprise is compromised.
WildFire is an integral part of the Palo Alto Networks security platform that includes the Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewall, Threat Intelligence Cloud, and Traps Advanced Endpoint Protection.
Through the integration, Tanium will receive malicious indicators identified by WildFire and automatically interrogate every geographically distributed endpoint across an organisation, validate the existence of an active cyber attack, identify all of the compromised systems and take remediation action as needed, all within seconds, Kinzelberg says.
Additionally, as Tanium identifies new threat indicators at the endpoint, it will share that information with Palo Alto Networks, creating a closed-loop system whereby network and endpoint protections are continually enhanced and delivered across an organisation using the integrated offering.
"Today's organisations face a daunting challenge in preventing and remediating cyberattacks as quickly as possible across their distributed organisations," Kinzelberg says.
"We are pleased to be teaming with Tanium to fundamentally change the game for adversaries, arming security organisations with innovative new tools to go on the offensive and quickly prevent, detect, and respond to attacks before damage is done."
Orion Hindawi, co-founder, president and CTO of Tanium, says, "We are honoured to be entering into an alliance with Palo Alto Networks that will be transformative for the security industry as we extend security and remediation capabilities between network and endpoint security.
Hindawi says, "Our first integration provides a level of automation, access, and control that security teams of large, global organizations have never had before—at a time when new ways to defend against security attacks has elevated to a board level discussion."
