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Tanium, the heavily funded computer security startup, has named its first chief communications officer. Scott Rubin, who spent about eight years in communications jobs for Google and most recently worked for venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, started in his new role at Tanium today.
Rubin will be reporting directly to Tanium co-founder and CTO Orion Hindawi. He started in Google’s communications shop in 2008 as senior manager for policy and communications and left in 2014 after a stint as director of corporate communications and public affairs.
By moving to Tanium, he’ll kind of remain within the Andreessen Horowitz family. The VC firm was until recently the company’s only outside investor, pouring in a combined $142 million through last March. That was before TPG, T. Rowe Price and IVP participated in a $120 million round last fall. All in, Tanium has taken more than $260 million and was recently valued at north of $3.5 billion.
Rubin’s is the latest in a series of moves both on the strategy and personnel front. In June, Tanium named David Damato, a former executive with the security company FireEye, as its chief security officer and expanded its offices in Washington, D.C., where it does a lot of business with government agencies and defense firms. In July, it inked a strategic alliance with the consulting firm PwC.
Tanium’s software is a combination of an IT security and systems management tool aimed at large-scale corporate computing environments. The software can quickly scan and map out all the machines and devices running on a corporate network — IT managers like to refer to them collectively as “endpoints” — and track the software running on them. At its most basic level, it helps IT managers at large companies check on the status of the thousands of PCs, servers, printers and other devices on their networks. The software might ask a desktop PC in a far-flung branch office if it has its latest Windows patch, or command a glitchy server on the other side of the country to restart itself. That capability comes in handy when a company is under attack by hackers.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
