IT Automation Trends: Observations from Tanium Converge 2024

Entering 2025, IT automation will continue to have a major impact on organizations, including right here at apiphani. We believe automation helps teams of all sizes do more with their skills, especially benefiting smaller teams by expanding both the depth and breadth of what they can accomplish. By leveraging the right toolsets like automation, smaller teams can do the same amount of work as larger delivery centers. This approach is the foundation of apiphani, built from a managed service perspective – combining top-tier tools and automation with expert talent.

I recently attended Tanium’s Converge 2024 conference where IT automation was on full display. In this piece, I’ll highlight three IT automation trends I found particularly interesting along with examples of how Converge showcased these trends in action.

Real-Time Information Gathering

“The Power of Certainty” was the overarching conference theme, and Tanium put an emphasis on their ability to view your entire environment and provide immediate, accurate information. The idea is that once you understand your environment you can control it. We continue to see organizations shift towards real-time information gathering versus relying on data that could be hours or days old. For instance, Tanium can query an environment in real time to help identify systems vulnerable to zero-day exploits.

Automation tool providers, like Tanium, continue shifting towards real-time information gathering to support this need. At Converge, Tanium announced a new Automate Endpoint Management (AEM) feature which provides a confidence score for operating systems and Predefined Package Gallery updates. This confidence score is based on worldwide deployments of updates and metrics such as application crashes after the update is installed or the number of updates removed after installation. Automated playbooks can be created based on achieving a minimum confidence score, thus reducing the chance of having an update cause a problem in the environment. This automates what would typically be a burdensome administrative process to approve patches and updates. Rather than relying on people to guess that the system worked okay, organizations can now depend on automated confidence scores based on real data.

Integration and Automation Across Platforms

Due to the industry shift towards cloud-based SaaS solutions (e.g. the cloud versions of Tanium and ServiceNow), more teams are operating in cloud environments and looking for ways to automate across platforms and improve data integration. APIs have made integrating data more straightforward compared to on-premises solutions that are typically more difficult and time consuming.

At Converge, we saw how ServiceNow and Tanium are using modules in ServiceNow that can trigger actions in Tanium enabling two-way communication and automating the process of patching through the ServiceNow change control process.

As more solutions make additional functionality available through APIs, we’ll continue to see the trend of automation across toolsets. Apiphani is already taking advantage of similar integration across systems and our team is excited to see what additional capabilities will become available in the year ahead.

The Role of AI

The final trend I’d like to highlight is how artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to achieve automation. At Converge, it was interesting to see how AI is aiding features such as Tanium Ask, a natural language using AI to interpret the need and then interpret that into code that Tanium can use to fetch the information.

This is part of a larger industry trend where more tool providers are leveraging AI to assist developers with natural language coding and scripting.  For example, rather than doing research, a time intensive task, I can ask AI to put together a script that performs a task and proofread it to achieve speed and accuracy. That’s exactly how AI is being leveraged in this scenario. In the military this is referred to as a force multiplier – the idea that you can make an individual more efficient and achieve greater productivity.

Converge also highlighted an interesting integration between Tanium and Microsoft Copilot for Security In this instance, Tanium collects information that is both current and accurate, and feeds that into Microsoft’s security platform. AI is then used to identify potential security vulnerabilities. This allows Copilot to more effectively summarize vast data signals into key insights. We can expect this trend to continue as more tools integrate AI for various use cases to aid automation in security and beyond.

Closing Thoughts

Having accurate, reliable data that you can analyze quickly is a powerful tool in any IT stack. Through the power of IT automation, that process is constantly improving so we can all leverage these solutions to pair the best tools with the most skilled people to achieve the right approach. Tanium has provided a framework for integration to achieve the level of automation that organizations can then build upon to import or export data and processes to realize desired outcomes. The innovative solutions and partnerships highlighted at Tanium Converge 2024 will enhance how we serve our customers at apiphani, and we’re eagerly anticipating next year’s event.