Background: Before rolling out Tanium to our Manufacturing sites, each site used a very manual process to install patches, software, updates, etc. It was not a uniform process either, some sites ran manual updates, or didn't update at all just because it was so difficult. There was also no clear direction on what was getting updated/patched.

Approach: Tanium was installed/in the process of being installed on all Manufacturing clients/locations. Once Tanium was installed, processes to push out patches were created and now we have an easy way to install software on Manufacturing devices without having to manually install the software one by one. Since Tanium is at so many sites now, we can push by Manufacturing site. We can even leave it up to Manufacturing on when they want to install (during maintenance windows or down time) via the self-service portal! They like this a lot. They now have a good grasp on installing new tools, packages, etc. Specifically, we are using Tanium to deploy a new Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solution. This saves a ton of time because it can be done with the click of a button to multiple machines instead of manually installing on each individual machine.

Findings: We learned that Manufacturing has a lot more use cases for using deploy to push out software or updates to sensitives clients. We learned there are two different ways to do this: via self-service, and via a deployment. Manufacturing likes the various options due to the complexity of their sites/locations. This works out great because it gives them flexibility of when they can install software, and it is more efficient than manually installing. It also does not require a reboot which Manufacturing loves.

We have used self-service/deployments to install the EDR tool on over 500 clients so far and we are adding more sites to the list. We have also used deploy to set up proxy servers at various Manufacturing plants without having to manually have a Manufacturing site lead login to the server.

Roadmap: Continue to use Deploy to push out the EDR tool to all of Manufacturing consisting of thousands of hosts.

Manufacturing has also come to us with additional use cases for Deploy (installing a new Application Monitoring tool on manufacturing devices, updating an existing tool, etc.)

Conclusion: Tanium has allowed us to update our Manufacturing devices at a staggeringly fast rate. We no longer have uncoordinated rollouts of tools and updates. Plants/sites are more organized and running more efficiently.

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