Today, there are few risks to corporations more pervasive and evolving than cyber threats. Microsoft’s ‘Digital Defense Report 2025’ illustrates that more than 50 percent of last year’s cyber incidents were motivated by extortion or destruction.
Only two percent of organizations have implemented cyber resilience actions across all areas, according to PwC’s ‘Findings from the 2025 Global Digital Trust Insights’ report. Less than 50 percent of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) are deeply involved in core business decisions and there is a 13 percent confidence gap that exists between CISOs and CEOs on AI and resilience compliance.
Additionally, Accenture’s ‘State of Cybersecurity Resilience 2025’ report states that “77 percent of organizations lack the foundational data and AI security practices needed to safeguard critical models, data pipelines and cloud infrastructure. These are not just vulnerabilities – they are systemic blind spots that leave enterprises fundamentally unprepared to defend against modern, AI-driven threats.”
However you slice it, cybercrime is not going away.
In 2025 alone, it is set to cost companies around the world US$10.5 trillion and that number is set to rise. Research by the University of Memphis points to a worrying link between victimized companies: digital transformation initiatives.
This correlation puts businesses between a rock and a very hard place where they must adapt, risk losing everything in a cyberattack, or die.
If that weren’t enough, the advent of AI has added an extra dimension to the cybersecurity landscape. Generative AI is being used to detect and mitigate cyberattacks, but it’s also being used by the other side to enhance their efforts to break in.
The Tanium difference
So to say the companies in charge of warding off cybercrime have their work cut out for them is the understatement of the 21st century. Any cybersecurity platform worth its salt has to deliver two things to the businesses lining up for help: adaptability and certainty.
Dan Streetman, CEO of Washington-based cybersecurity firm Tanium, believes his company does just that. And as he tells The CEO Magazine, the power of certainty is paramount.
“If you can’t see it, you can’t fix it. You can’t control it,” he says. “Every organization now must manage an increasingly interconnected IT landscape.
“The ability to have complete visibility into every part of your organization’s IT infrastructure, the ability to take immediate action to update devices and processes, and the ability to respond rapidly when you identify a risk are each more important than ever before.
“Being both proactive and resilient is key to helping businesses remain unstoppable.”
As a cybersecurity platform, Tanium provides that visibility and control in real time, all from a single point of entry. According to Streetman, this is an extremely potent offering.
“Now is the time for organizations to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses against these attacks by leveraging speed and visibility, essentially fighting ‘bad AI’ with ‘good AI,’” he says.
“In the world of AI, you need real-time insights in order to make critical decisions, and that’s what we provide.”
While learning models aren’t new, Streetman says Tanium’s goes further than the off-the-shelf solutions commonly available.
“Legacy IT providers build automation models around ‘if this, then that’ logic, which is limiting, slow and prone to causing disruptions in unanticipated ways. Tanium changes the paradigm, delivering self-learning autonomous agents that can take action, monitor the impact of that action and adjust the action – all under the control of humans-in-the-loop, but much faster than ever possible before.”
Going further, Tanium can then provide a confidence score about what happens after that. It’s this kind of extra mile that has made it a world-class IT operations security platform that harnesses the power of AI unlike any other.
Wrestling with success
It follows that Streetman should lead in an equally exceptional way. A former wrestler, he’s no stranger to high-end performance and the thrilling balance of risk and reward.
“I’m very proud to be the leader of Tanium,” says Streetman, formerly CEO of integration and analytics solutions specialist TIBCO Software, as well as part of the team at BMC, Salesforce and C3.ai.
“There’s no teacher like experience,” he explains. “I’ve always gravitated toward high-stakes environments and I think there’s no more high-stakes environment than the squared circle.”
In the wrestling ring, he says, you’re alone in the spotlight.
“You’re working for a team, but ultimately you have to put yourself out there,” he says. “From an early age, my high school wrestling coach taught me to take that stress and pour it into taking on challenges. He was a great mentor.”
Streetman took the advice to heart, joining the United States Military Academy at West Point. The experience, and his subsequent time as a United States Army Officer, gave him mission focus, love and respect for duty, honor and country and helped shape him into a leader with character.
“But the thing I learned most of all is that the critical characteristic of a high-performing organization is an important and enduring mission.”
Mission possible
As AI makes its way into every facet of modern life, the good and the bad sides of that permeation are becoming clearer. The real-time data it can produce is an extremely powerful tool for both sides of the coin.
“Bad actors are going to use AI, whether they’re nation-state actors or simply cybercriminals,” Streetman explains. “They don’t have to get it right each time, either. When they use AI, they can use it irresponsibly and at reckless speeds.”
Tanium’s clients, whether high-end retailers, banks or government departments, have to act just as quickly as those bad actors, albeit with certainty.
“They have to be confident that when they use AI for good, it’s not creating more impact than others,” he points out. “Last summer, we saw an example of that where a vendor made changes and it brought down a whole lot of devices.”
The Tanium mission is to help organizations navigate these very choppy waters.
“We help organizations make sure that doesn’t happen,” he adds. “The real power of Tanium is that organizations can leverage real-time information to inform and guide agentic AI.
“We’ve been regarded as the first company to talk about this kind of autonomous endpoint management for IT, and we’re absolutely the first to deliver it. Helping our customers to build autonomous, reliable and unstoppable IT systems isn’t just a job, it’s a mission.”
Square one
The Tanium story began with David Hindawi, a software engineer and entrepreneur. After founding a series of successful telecommunications and IT systems management companies in the 1980s and 1990s, Hindawi and his son Orion established Tanium in 2007.
Knowing that tomorrow’s cybersecurity threats would require technology that could scale across ever-growing global networks, Hindawi became the company’s first CEO and created a strong foundation for the groundbreaking work the company later achieved, first under Orion Hindawi’s leadership and now with Dan Streetman at the helm.
“I became aware of Tanium when I became a customer of Tanium during my time at TIBCO,” Streetman says.
“Our CIO had come from SolarWinds, which had that Sunburst cyberattack. She lived through the pain of that, so one of the first things she did at TIBCO was choose Tanium as the cybersecurity provider. I saw how the platform transformed our organization and what we were able to do.”
When Tanium later approached Streetman to join the company, he didn’t hesitate.
“I was all in,” he recalls.
This is the ability to not only know your company’s endpoints, but also have the confidence to make necessary changes knowing things will go smoothly.
“But we take it further by building in capabilities so that users don’t have to be experts,” Streetman says.
“Our real-time data infrastructure allows clients to build a great large language model that tells you, ‘I’ve observed these things happen over time, I know what the right next best step is going to be.’
“But to know what happens when you take that step and to be able to have the confidence to do the same across the entire enterprise is important.”
This is done in natural language, rather than inscrutable cyberspeak, and Tanium’s answers follow suit.
“Once upon a time, the world’s most sophisticated users were the only ones who could achieve this,” he recalls. “Now, we’ve put that power into the hands of schools, banks, even water districts. The largest water district in the United States is a Tanium customer. We help protect critical infrastructure.”
With a presence in 32 of the 50 American states and many countries around the world, Tanium is able to provide capabilities of support to a range of society’s matters.
“I love that mission. I love the fact that we deliver the power of certainty to organizations of so many types,” he reveals.
Team effort
According to Streetman, this mission is shared by the entire Tanium team.
“Our teammates all believe in that mission. They rally around that mission,” he insists. “It’s something that, as a former paratrooper, comes a little bit more naturally to me.”
During his time in the Allied Mobile Force in Cold War Europe, and later when deployed to combat in Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Streetman became adept at interoperating between organizations. It’s a skill that continues to serve him well.
“In a high-stakes environment, developing cohesion and understanding how organizations work better together is integral,” he says.
“I was fortunate enough to attend business school immediately after active duty service and integrate that mentality into my work, to put it into a framework that made sense in a commercial environment. But for me, it always comes back to a mission.”
As CEO, Streetman has tried his best to imbue the most important qualities he believes the best leaders have.
“I learned early on this idea that I need to be confident in order to lead and bring an organization together, but I also have to understand I don’t have all the answers,” he reflects.
“At West Point, there are signs everywhere that say, ‘Lead from the front.’ The idea being that you take a young high schooler and turn them into a leader of character who can step up and lead from the front.”
Streetman has modified that message in a way he believes is more effective in his chosen industry.
“The real trick is to lead from the middle,” he advises. “Get the best insights from your team, make sure they’re organized and focused on your mission. Work harder than everyone else, put in the extra effort and set the example from the front, but lead from the middle. That’s where I get the best insights from my team.”
It’s also where he learned he could chart a productive course for those lost after duty ended.
“I left active duty in 1998. I saw that I could perhaps make a bigger difference in the world leading a technology organization than I could leading a company of paratroopers. I absolutely loved leading paratroopers, but I also find real meaning in what we do here at Tanium, every day,” he notes.
Away from active duty, Streetman made the choice to focus on technology. Later, he worked with organizations such as BreakLine and VetsinTech to help veterans transition into technology as he had done.
“The original purpose was to help veterans find roles in technology – and, of course, help organizations to benefit from their experience and values, such as integrity and teamwork,” he says.
“What I learned is that those same recruiting approaches now help us build bridges for all types of under-represented talent, adding unique skill sets and experiences that make us a better company.”
Partners in cybercrime-fighting
Streetman believes it’s in that space where teamwork is especially important.
“Nobody will ever do as much alone as they will as a team,” he explains. “If you think about rowing, four people in a shell, if they’re synchronized, will always go faster than a single person. Technology has made that kind of partnering more important than ever before.”
Which is why Tanium shrewdly partners with a host of world-class organizations, including Microsoft and ServiceNow, to best support its customers.
“It used to be organizations had 30 or 40 different endpoint solutions to solve each individual problem they faced,” Streetman says. “That’s unmanageable complexity in this world. On the other hand, relying on a single platform also invites risk.”
Dan Streetman meeting with Steve Dispensa, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Security
What organizations need are a few select strategic partners that work well together; in other words, Tanium’s own strategy.
“Again, my military background showed me that working with a select few partners within NATO helped us learn to operate. It’s hard at first, but if you take the time to do it, you have even more capability than you did before,” he confirms.
These partnerships begin on a foundation of trust, he adds.
“Our alliances with Microsoft and ServiceNow are great examples. We’re delivering powerful joint solutions with them, ones that help customers decrease their effort in investigating, assessing and responding to threats by more than 40 percent. That’s a huge impact, and I’m very proud of it.”
Clean-up time
Clients including AstraZeneca and Cognizant have put Tanium’s solutions, especially Tanium AEM for ServiceNow, to great use.
“The efficiency helps them reduce risk, lower costs and, most importantly, gives them more confidence,” Streetman says.
“When a customer’s using Now Assist, they know they’re relying on real-time, accurate data about what’s happening right now in the enterprise, and then they can use Tanium AEM for ServiceNow to make any changes.”
The partnership is powerful – Tanium has skills and capabilities that Microsoft and ServiceNow don’t; the latter have data and reach that Tanium lacks. Together, they’re stronger.
“And in some cases there’s overlap, which is exactly what you want – a defense in depth,” Streetman stresses.
“Your reserve capability should have all the same capabilities as your front line; it’s just their focus and mission and how they choose to collaborate and coordinate. Our focus on that is what I think makes the biggest difference in the marketplace. It’s near and dear to my heart.”
Army intelligence
In the final analysis, a team that operates well together achieves its mission. This is the source of Streetman’s clear-eyed belief in the company’s worthwhile mission – and that despite the upswing in risks and dangers in the digital world, that mission will be accomplished.
“It’s easy to remain calm in a crisis – or a cybersecurity breach – when you’ve set the foundation early on. You’ve put in the extra effort, you’ve made sure you’re technically confident and you’re leading from the middle,” he says.
“At Tanium, it’s our job to help you do that. That’s our critical and enduring mission, and that’s what I love about Tanium.”
