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Microsoft and Tanium - unifying endpoint management and security in the AI era -Tanium Tech Talks #152 video thumbnail
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Microsoft + Tanium: Unifying endpoint management and security in the AI era - Tanium Tech Talks #152

Tanium Solutions Engineer Doug Thompson explains how Tanium acts as the connective tissue across Microsoft's security stack, delivering endpoint visibility and control that can help Defender for Endpoint, Sentinel, Intune, Entra ID, and Security Copilot work more effectively across complex enterprise environments.

The Microsoft and Tanium partnership has reached a new level of depth and integration. Now in its third consecutive year earning Microsoft partner recognition, including the Microsoft Americas Partner of the Year Award, the relationship goes well beyond standard API documentation. Tanium works directly with Microsoft product groups to design integrations that complement each platform's strengths, filling the gaps that arise in large, multi-domain enterprise environments where visibility and control are hardest to maintain.

Tanium Solutions Engineer Doug Thompson, who spent 20 years at Microsoft before joining Tanium, brings a uniquely informed perspective to explaining exactly how these two platforms work better together. He walks through the full landscape of Microsoft + Tanium integrations, from Azure VM extensions and Azure Migrate workload costing, to Defender for Endpoint deployment and health management, Sentinel real-time data integration, Entra ID zero trust device attestation, Intune multi-environment management, and the Security Copilot security triage agent. Doug also demonstrates several of these capabilities live, showing how Tanium provides a single, domain-agnostic view across environments that would otherwise require administrators to manually triangulate data across multiple consoles and tenants.

If your organization runs any combination of Microsoft security and endpoint management tools, and especially if you're managing multiple domains, tenants, or Intune environments, this episode covers capabilities that could meaningfully change how your team operates. Watch the full video below to see these integrations in action.

Key takeaways

  • Tanium as the "mortar": Doug describes Microsoft security products like Security Copilot, Defender for Endpoint, and Azure VM extensions as the "big blue blocks," the bricks in a security wall, with Tanium serving as the mortar that holds them together, answering fundamental questions like what a machine is doing right now and where it is, regardless of what else is going on.
“Think about this as a wall. And the big blue blocks are the bricks and we're actually the mortar that holds all this stuff together.”
Tanium Solutions Engineer Doug Thompson
  • Azure VM extensions and workload costing: Tanium is available as an Azure VM extension, making it easy to include the Tanium agent as part of a VM template when spinning up new machines. For Azure Migrate, Tanium's deep knowledge of the machines it runs on enables accurate workload costing, including reseller discounts, removing the guesswork from estimating what a workload will cost to run in Azure.
  • Security triage agent in the Security Copilot store: Tanium's security triage agent is available directly in the Microsoft Security Copilot security store and helps sort through the noise of security signals to surface what's important. The triage agent with identity insights extends this by combining Tanium's endpoint data with Entra ID information, enabling more informed decisions about when a device was compromised.
  • Defender for Endpoint—find it and fix it: Tanium's real-time, proprietary Liner Chain Architecture enables a "find it and fix it" approach to Defender for Endpoint deployment and health management. Administrators can query which endpoints are missing Defender, deploy onboarding packages for Windows, Linux, and Mac from a single interface, set ongoing deployment schedules, and monitor readiness, adoption, and health, including signature version sprawl and reboot-pending status, all from one place, across multiple domains.
  • Intune multi-environment management: The Tanium Intune connector supports up to 20 separate Intune environments simultaneously, pulling device data, including primary user, operating system, storage usage, and battery life, into a single view. Administrators can take actions like device synchronization or wipe directly from within Tanium, with the command passed to Intune and results typically returned quickly, reducing the need to switch between multiple consoles.
“I don't have to keep switching apps to get this and then manually trying to triangulate what the truth is.”
Tanium Solutions Engineer Doug Thompson
  • Entra ID zero trust last-mile attestation: Tanium provides last-mile device health attestation for Entra ID zero trust scenarios, reporting on device state as of 10 minutes ago. This freshness of data matters because links can be clicked and devices can be compromised within hours. Tanium's ability to quickly confirm device health and remediate issues helps get users out of the "penalty box" and back to productive work faster.
“We give you that information as of 10 minutes ago, so you can't really get any fresher data than that.”
Tanium Solutions Engineer Doug Thompson
  • Sentinel playbooks for SOC analysts: Tanium's Sentinel integration provides real-time, current data to the Sentinel data lake, and pre-built playbooks allow SOC analysts to query Tanium and take action, such as installing a missing patch, directly from within the Sentinel console, without needing to know anything about Tanium. As Doug puts it, the connectors are built in, the connection is made, and the SOC analyst's life gets a lot easier.

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