North Carolina partners with Tanium to strengthen state cybersecurity

Source Domain: statescoop.com

North Carolina’s Department of Information Technology announced Thursday that it has selected Tanium as the statewide endpoint management and cybersecurity platform for SecureNC, the state’s collaborative cybersecurity program that provides resources and guidance to state and local agencies.

According to the Thursday announcement, Tanium will help consolidate the state’s management and security operations on a single platform, with real‑time data and automated investigations of security threats. The voluntary initiative will roll out in phases across local governments, higher education institutions and other public entities.

For state Chief Information Security Officer Bernice Russell-Bond, the partnership is part of a broader effort to shift North Carolina’s cybersecurity from reactive to proactive and, more importantly, accurately reflect the current threat environment with the emergence of artificial intelligence tools.

“We all know with the development of these frontier AI solutions that they are going to help people in a cyber field, but they’re also used by our adversaries,” Russell-Bond told StateScoop in an interview this week. “And that’s going to allow them to not only identify vulnerabilities faster, but to try to exploit them faster, too.”

The state has already piloted the program with several local entities and reported more than a 40% improvement in cybersecurity posture among participating organizations after 60 days, according to Russell-Bond, who said the tools also helped improve its patch management cycle — shrinking remediation timelines from monthly cycles to less than 10 days.

“We’re patching as soon as we get a vulnerability and get that patch tested,” Russell-Bond said. “We’re cutting in half or more the time span that an adversary can exploit us.”

Russell-Bond, who’s been the state CISO for over a year, said one of her first priorities after joining NCDIT was assessing…

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