Harman Kaur is the Vice President of AI at Tanium, a pacesetter in Autonomous Endpoint Administration (AEM) with the business’s solely true real-time platform for AI. She brings over a decade of expertise in management, technical innovation, and cybersecurity, gained by means of her tenure at Tanium and repair within the US Air Drive.
In her earlier function as Chief of Employees at Tanium, Kaur labored intently with the Government Chairman, CEO, and govt workforce to drive strategic development, expertise alliances, and organizational execution, leveraging her deep experience in cybersecurity and IT.
Earlier, Kaur held a number of roles inside Tanium’s area engineering group, the place she managed key accounts and contributed to product improvement and innovation, furthering the corporate’s mission to supply cutting-edge options for endpoint administration.
What initially sparked your curiosity in AI and cybersecurity, and the way did that keenness evolve right into a profession that led you to turn out to be VP of AI at Tanium?
I joined the navy after I was 18 for the chance to construct a life the best way that I needed to do it. That allowed me the chance to check completely different fields like legislation, earlier than assembly a mentor who impressed me to discover ways to use computer systems. That modified my life. I ended up getting a level which was a mixture of Pc Science and Enterprise. Then, with that have, I labored in a cyber intelligence navy unit. That jump-started my profession and led me to work at Tanium when it was nonetheless a startup.
Since then, I’ve worn many various hats at Tanium. I’ve labored in technical roles and been Chief of Employees for our Chairman and CEO. Finally, my curiosity in constructing new merchandise with rising and new applied sciences is what drew me to my present function.
When you can research cybersecurity and AI at school, these of us who discover ourselves in these areas or who’re all in favour of them need to carve our personal paths. It’s a area the place all of us deliver completely different backgrounds and experience to the desk, and what actually units you aside is the way you apply that context and data.
How does your twin expertise within the navy and AI intersect by way of decision-making, management, and problem-solving?
My twin expertise within the navy and AI intersects in decision-making, management, and problem-solving. Within the navy, I honed the power to make fast, strategic choices beneath stress, working in various settings like hospitals, upkeep and flying items,            cyber, and even on employees for Generals. At Tanium, I’ve centered on constructing groups, merchandise, and partnerships, which requires a extra analytical method. This mix of experiences offers me a novel perspective and the arrogance to beat any problem.
You’ve talked about that automation will likely be important for cybersecurity groups by 2025. What particular developments do you foresee making automation indispensable within the coming years?
By itself, automation helps a corporation scale cybersecurity practices. The extra we undertake further gadgets, software program and methods, the extra automation can improve and persistently implement safety insurance policies throughout massive environments whereas figuring out patterns to create higher, extra proactive protection.
Automation additionally gives important insights into working methods by means of higher knowledge aggregation. This enables our safety groups to optimize their insurance policies at a time when expertise is continually altering and introducing new threats.
AI takes automation capabilities to a brand new stage. The mixture of the 2 permits organizations to deal with repetitive, mundane duties in order that human cybersecurity specialists can concentrate on high-impact work. Coupled with real-time knowledge on a corporation’s working surroundings because it seems to be right this moment, AI and automation can detect threats and remediate points sooner than earlier than.
In your view, what’s probably the most vital impediment for corporations aiming to implement automation of their cybersecurity practices, and the way can they put together to beat it?
Organizations have to think about the dangers this expertise introduces, particularly on the subject of identification and authentication. They’ll want to think about tips on how to deal with these new threats related to automation. They’ll additionally have to introduce robust governance mechanisms and clear suggestions loops in order that safety groups can monitor what AI and automation are literally doing, adjusting insurance policies as wanted.
What developments in AI will Tanium be pursuing to boost endpoint safety in 2025? Might you elaborate on the function of automation and AI in autonomous endpoint administration?
With autonomous endpoint administration, or AEM, we’re automating each core IT workflow: endpoint administration, positive, but additionally safety, incident response, patching, change administration, and efficiency monitoring. Automated methods can deal with the mundane, repetitive work concerned in these processes. Then, we’re coupling our unmatched means to supply real-time knowledge on a corporation’s working surroundings with AI that may floor important insights on actual threats and vulnerabilities as they’re taking place and steps for remediation. Our purpose, so to talk, is to show the keys of the mundane duties over to automation and let AI deal with risk detection in order that cybersecurity groups can concentrate on executing on remediation sooner. Their belief within the product empowers them to concentrate on business-critical work.
By way of what we’re pursuing in 2025, first, we’ll proceed to put money into higher automation. We wish to push boundaries and make automation much more of a power multiplier than it already is in addition to constructing brokers. We’re pondering: How can we make it greater? How can we make it so sturdy and so easy that our human cybersecurity groups can focus much less on the mundane work and extra on the high-impact work?
We’ll additionally broaden to prioritize visibility into proactive cybersecurity. We wish to give our prospects visibility into issues earlier than they go mistaken. That, together with utilizing knowledge for higher decision-making, is a significant focus for us. We wish to give actionable suggestions that organizations can take earlier than they’re impacted by the following huge vulnerability.
Why is real-time knowledge important to creating AI in safety efficient? How does Tanium guarantee its AI capabilities are genuinely leveraging real-time knowledge?
AI helps us improve productiveness and do issues sooner. Nonetheless, there’s a stage of hesitation with this expertise. Organizations wish to make sure that they’ll belief the outcomes and people outcomes must be actionable. Actual-time knowledge is an unimaginable validation instrument and enabler of motion. Having the ability to discover points after they occur and utilizing that data to make sure they don’t occur once more is useful, however having the ability to discover points as they occur and remediating these points in real-time with the context of your precise working surroundings because it seems to be like right this moment is a superpower – and the way forward for cybersecurity.
With Tanium, real-time knowledge lets you work together together with your endpoints and put AI’s data to work. It offers actions based mostly on historic and present knowledge and learnings to attract conclusions for the longer term. We do that with our endpoint administration agent, which repeatedly collects and transmits knowledge to a centralized supply of reality, no matter whether or not the system is on-line or offline. Our Tanium Knowledge Service collects data repeatedly and routinely from the registered sensors of all endpoints. That ensures the information that our AI capabilities are utilizing is genuinely real-time knowledge.
What ought to corporations consider when choosing AI-driven safety suppliers to make sure they’re getting sturdy, real-time options?
First, organizations ought to have interaction with as many suppliers as doable. Everyone seems to be investing in AI proper now. There isn’t a standardized, one-size-fits-all resolution to utilizing this expertise, and it’s price investigating all of the completely different approaches to AI.
Secondly, organizations want to know the place they wish to focus. Whether or not it’s worker productiveness, sooner coding, note-taking, or higher parameter safety, they want to determine their highest precedence moderately than making an attempt to boil the ocean.
After aligning on that, it’s vital to create a framework round onboarding. Merely shopping for an answer and turning it on gained’t work, even when a vendor says it’ll. Safety groups want to consider entry management and knowledge coverage. AI requires considerably extra onboarding than earlier instruments, and most organizations might want to create the processes for that effectively forward of implementation.
Might you present a imaginative and prescient for Tanium’s roadmap, significantly the way it goals to realize autonomous endpoint administration and streamline advanced IT environments?
Already, AEM is delivering autonomous capabilities throughout our present platform. Utilizing real-time knowledge and insights from tens of millions of endpoints, we share suggestions and allow organizations to automate adjustments on these endpoints to allow them to streamline their operations and enhance safety wholesale. AEM is a complete platform, and it empowers our prospects to take motion on the proper time and to trust of their choices, that are based mostly on real-time, scaled knowledge.
That’s the place we’re proper now, however we’re not completed. Now we have plans for the way we’ll proceed to deal with advanced cybersecurity issues. Shifting ahead, we’re specializing in the convergence of two issues to bolster cybersecurity: AI and IT operations. Loads of suppliers mix AI and safety, and we’re doing the identical already, however we additionally wish to be the gold normal for AI in IT operations. Personally, I’d wish to see each single Tanium buyer have at the least one course of they’ve absolutely automated. Hopefully, that first step might help them construct a basis for automating their processes even additional.
How does Tanium’s platform tackle the visibility and management challenges that many organizations face as their digital environments broaden?
The largest hurdle for a corporation is complete visibility— figuring out what gadgets are in your group and plugged into your community.
That is one thing we’re already addressing with Tanium. Our core energy is real-time visibility and interplay with gadgets throughout a corporation’s digital ecosystem. We might help you see what apps you’re operating and collect details about each system in simply seconds. That stage of connectivity and real-time entry to knowledge from all endpoints enhances each visibility and management, that are once more challenges for organizations as we see digital environments broaden considerably. It’s our mission to remove these issues.
We take that mission a step additional by empowering organizations to make a change, such patching a machine, in a matter of minutes. Tanium permits organizations to work together with their total digital property at scale.  For instance, if there’s a safety incident, they’ll see what occurred in real-time and take motion instantly, so prospects don’t even really feel the affect. It’s fast and it’s seamless.
What recommendation would you give to aspiring professionals, particularly girls, seeking to pursue a profession in AI and cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity and AI are massive fields so strive plenty of various things. These fields may also really feel very intimidating however keep in mind everyone seems to be making an attempt to determine it out. That will help you construct confidence my recommendation for anybody, not simply girls, is to determine what expertise are lacking on a workforce and work in direction of filling that hole. Filling within the gaps might help construct confidence in your self as an issue solver whereas additionally making you indispensable.
Thanks for the good interview, readers who want to be taught extra ought to go to Tanium.
