Without a doubt, the central theme for 2022 is cybersecurity. The topic is at the top of many legislatures’ minds, and the federal government has issued several mandates and recommendations on how agencies should improve their cyber security posture — but that’s also happening at the level of state and local government.
The recently released Cal-Secure plan is California’s first multi-year cyber security roadmap. This is a great step towards improving the state’s cyber hygiene and vision, as it outlines actionable phases — with measurable success criteria — to foster a world-class cybersecurity workforce, an empowered cybersecurity oversight governance structure, and effective defenses to all technology. But with 29 technical capabilities, there’s a chance that California departments could further increase the number of point tools used for cyber security – which would lead to a higher level of tool proliferation than already exists.
That’s why California departments need to pursue a platform-approach to satisfying the Cal-Secure plan, choosing technologies that can satisfy as many technical capabilities in the same category as possible.
After years of partnering with state government agencies to enhance their cyber hygiene, Tanium account managers who support California customers know first-hand how many point tools are often used for security and operations tasks centered around securing, inventorying and compliance monitoring for software and IT assets. “We’ve had customers that were using more than 15 point tools for their endpoint management, device patching, software utilization, and more,” says Zachary Nandapurkar, Technical Account Manager for the Public Sector at Tanium. “And we understand how difficult and time consuming it can be for organizations to train their staff and integrate so many point solutions just to achieve the same goal, not to mention the performance impact of so many agents on employee devices.” Not only does tool proliferation introduce management complexity, but it also can increase cyber security risk when tools get out of date, and updating them at scale isn’t always easy.
Cal-Secure’s main priorities revolve around people, process and technology – and Tanium brings an added value to the technology realm. Specifically, under Phase Two of the roadmap’s cybersecurity capabilities, Tanium’s endpoint management and security platform can help California Government stakeholders increase patch management efficacy, asset management, incident response, continuous security response, and cloud monitoring.
Tanium’s risk and compliance management and threat hunting solutions also satisfy the goals in Phase Three of Cybersecurity Capabilities by providing a threat detection platform to limit and mitigate provisions against the loss of critical data.
With a platform solution, governments can bridge the gaps between IT operations and security functions by reducing the complexity of their infrastructure and replacing outdated legacy applications — enhancing overall visibility into the enterprise. And with Tanium available on the SLP+, it’s even easier for California Departments to procure the software.
Learn more about how Tanium can help satisfy more than half of the technical capabilities outlined in the Cal Secure plan.
