Harman Kaur is the Vice President of AI at Tanium, a leader in Autonomous Endpoint Management (AEM) with the industry’s only true real-time platform for AI. She brings over a decade of experience in leadership, technical innovation, and cybersecurity, gained through her tenure at Tanium and service in the US Air Force.
In her previous role as Chief of Staff at Tanium, Kaur worked closely with the Executive Chairman, CEO, and executive team to drive strategic growth, technology alliances, and organizational execution, leveraging her deep expertise in cybersecurity and IT.
Earlier, Kaur held multiple roles within Tanium’s field engineering organization, where she managed key accounts and contributed to product development and innovation, furthering the company’s mission to provide cutting-edge solutions for endpoint management.
What initially sparked your interest in AI and cybersecurity, and how did that passion evolve into a career that led you to become VP of AI at Tanium?
I joined the military when I was 18 for the opportunity to build a life the way that I wanted to do it. That allowed me the opportunity to study different fields like law, before meeting a mentor who inspired me to learn how to use computers. That changed my life. I ended up getting a degree which was a mix of Computer Science and Business. Then, with that experience, I worked in a cyber intelligence military unit. That jump-started my career and led me to work at Tanium when it was still a startup.
Since then, I’ve worn many different hats at Tanium. I’ve worked in technical roles and been Chief of Staff for our Chairman and CEO. Ultimately, my interest in building new products with emerging and new technologies is what drew me to my current role.
While you can study cybersecurity and AI in school, those of us who find ourselves in these spaces or who are interested in them have to carve our own paths. It’s a field where we all bring different backgrounds and expertise to the table, and what really sets you apart is how you apply that context and knowledge.
How does your dual experience in the military and AI intersect in terms of decision-making, leadership, and problem-solving?
My dual experience in the military and AI intersects in decision-making, leadership, and problem-solving. In the military, I honed the ability to make quick, strategic decisions under pressure, working in diverse settings like hospitals, maintenance and flying units, cyber, and even on staff for Generals. At Tanium, I’ve focused on building teams, products, and partnerships, which requires a more analytical approach. This blend of experiences gives me a unique perspective and the confidence to overcome any challenge.
You’ve mentioned that automation will be essential for cybersecurity teams by 2025. What specific developments do you foresee making automation indispensable in the coming years?
On its own, automation helps an organization scale cybersecurity practices. The more we adopt additional devices, software and systems, the more automation can enhance and consistently enforce security policies across large environments while identifying patterns to create better, more proactive defense.
Automation also provides critical insights into operating systems through better data aggregation. This allows our security teams to optimize their policies at a time when technology is constantly changing and introducing new threats.
AI takes automation capabilities to a new level. The combination of the two allows organizations to handle repetitive, mundane tasks so that human cybersecurity experts can focus on high-impact work. Coupled with real-time data on an organization’s operating environment as it looks today, AI and automation can detect threats and remediate issues faster than before.
In your view, what’s the most significant obstacle for companies aiming to implement automation in their cybersecurity practices, and how can they prepare to overcome it?
Organizations have to consider the risks this technology introduces, especially when it comes to identity and authentication. They’ll need to consider how to handle these new threats associated with automation. They’ll also need to introduce strong governance mechanisms and transparent feedback loops so that security teams can monitor what AI and automation are actually doing, adjusting policies as needed.
What advancements in AI will Tanium be pursuing to enhance endpoint security in 2025? Could you elaborate on the role of automation and AI in autonomous endpoint management?
With autonomous endpoint management, or AEM, we’re automating every core IT workflow: endpoint management, sure, but also security, incident response, patching, change management, and performance monitoring. Automated systems can take care of the mundane, repetitive work involved in those processes. Then, we’re coupling our unmatched ability to provide real-time data on an organization’s operating environment with AI that can surface critical insights on real threats and vulnerabilities as they’re happening and steps for remediation. Our goal, so to speak, is to turn the keys of the mundane tasks over to automation and let AI handle threat detection so that cybersecurity teams can focus on executing on remediation faster. Their trust in the product empowers them to focus on business-critical work.
In terms of what we’re pursuing in 2025, first, we’ll continue to invest in better automation. We want to push boundaries and make automation even more of a force multiplier than it already is as well as building agents. We’re thinking: How can we make it bigger? How can we make it so robust and so simple that our human cybersecurity teams can focus less on the mundane work and more on the high-impact work?
We’ll also expand to prioritize visibility into proactive cybersecurity. We want to give our customers visibility into things before they go wrong. That, along with using data for better decision-making, is a major focus for us. We want to give actionable recommendations that organizations can take before they’re impacted by the next big vulnerability.
Why is real-time data critical to making AI in security effective? How does Tanium ensure its AI capabilities are genuinely leveraging real-time data?
AI is helping us enhance productivity and do things faster. However, there is a level of hesitation with this technology. Organizations want to make sure they can trust the results and those results need to be actionable. Real-time data is an incredible validation tool and enabler of action. Being able to find issues after they happen and using that information to ensure they don’t happen again is helpful, but being able to find issues as they happen and remediating those issues in real-time with the context of your actual operating environment as it looks like today is a superpower – and the future of cybersecurity.
With Tanium, real-time data allows you to interact with your endpoints and put AI’s knowledge to work. It gives actions based on historical and current data and learnings to draw conclusions for the future. We do this with our endpoint management agent, which continuously collects and transmits data to a centralized source of truth, regardless of whether the device is online or offline. Our Tanium Data Service collects information continuously and automatically from the registered sensors of all endpoints. That ensures the data that our AI capabilities are using is genuinely real-time data.
What should companies evaluate when selecting AI-driven security providers to ensure they’re getting robust, real-time solutions?
First, organizations should engage with as many providers as possible. Everyone is investing in AI right now. There is no standardized, one-size-fits-all solution to using this technology, and it’s worth investigating all the different approaches to AI.
Secondly, organizations need to understand where they want to focus. Whether it’s employee productivity, faster coding, note-taking, or better parameter security, they need to figure out their highest priority rather than trying to boil the ocean.
After aligning on that, it’s important to create a framework around onboarding. Simply buying a solution and turning it on won’t work, even if a vendor says it will. Security teams need to think about access control and data policy. AI requires significantly more onboarding than previous tools, and most organizations will need to create the processes for that well ahead of implementation.
Could you provide a vision for Tanium’s roadmap, particularly how it aims to achieve autonomous endpoint management and streamline complex IT environments?
Already, AEM is delivering autonomous capabilities across our existing platform. Using real-time data and insights from millions of endpoints, we share recommendations and enable organizations to automate changes on those endpoints so they can streamline their operations and improve security wholesale. AEM is a comprehensive platform, and it empowers our customers to take action at the right time and to have confidence in their decisions, which are based on real-time, scaled data.
That’s where we are right now, but we’re not finished. We have plans for how we’ll continue to tackle complex cybersecurity problems. Moving forward, we’re focusing on the convergence of two things to bolster cybersecurity: AI and IT operations. Plenty of providers combine AI and security, and we’re doing the same already, but we also want to be the gold standard for AI in IT operations. Personally, I’d like to see every single Tanium customer have at least one process they’ve fully automated. Hopefully, that first step can help them build a foundation for automating their processes even further.
How does Tanium’s platform address the visibility and control challenges that many organizations face as their digital environments expand?
The biggest hurdle for an organization is comprehensive visibility— knowing what devices are in your organization and plugged into your network.
This is something we’re already addressing with Tanium. Our core power is real-time visibility and interaction with devices across an organization’s digital ecosystem. We can help you see what apps you’re running and gather information about every device in just seconds. That level of connectivity and real-time access to data from all endpoints enhances both visibility and control, which are again challenges for organizations as we see digital environments expand significantly. It’s our mission to eliminate those problems.
We take that mission a step further by empowering organizations to make a change, such patching a machine, in a matter of minutes. Tanium allows organizations to interact with their entire digital estate at scale. For example, if there’s a security incident, they can see what happened in real-time and take action immediately, so customers don’t even feel the impact. It’s quick and it’s seamless.
What advice would you give to aspiring professionals, especially women, looking to pursue a career in AI and cybersecurity?
Cybersecurity and AI are large fields so try a lot of different things. These fields can also feel very intimidating but remember everyone is trying to figure it out. To help you build confidence my advice for anyone, not just women, is to identify what skills are missing on a team and work towards filling that gap. Filling in the gaps can help build confidence in yourself as a problem solver while also making you indispensable.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Tanium.
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