Tanium’s Ralph Kahn on ‘the death of silver bullet security’

Network security specialists recognize that traditional endpoint security and perimeter defenses are simply inadequate to protect today’s networks.

They’re no longer the “silver bullet” they once were to deal with attackers, said Ralph Kahn, vice president for federal sales at Tanium. The sheer number of threat detection alerts makes it virtually impossible to investigate and remediate all of the security incidents that networks experience today, he said.

Kahn, a veteran IT industry executive who worked for McAfee and EMC before joining Tanium in 2013, argues it’s crucial for IT organizations to have a real-time view of what’s on their networks.

He also makes the case for “speed to scale,” by having visibility and control over every endpoint on the network within seconds.

Kahn described how Tanium’s approach, providing “15-second visibility” across the network, provides CIOs and chief information security officers an upper hand in fortifying, not simply defending, their networks. It’s also one of the reasons Tanium is used by eight of the top 10 banks and four of the Fortune 10 companies.

Kahn also discussed how that level of visibility can reduce cyber response cycle times, from months, to literally seconds.