As mounting complexity, advanced sophistication of cyber attackers, and reliance on highly manual processes increase exposure to risk, cybersecurity operations and compliance remain key business challenges. What’s required is simplification, improved visibility, and automation of security operations, allowing enterprises to advance business innovation free from the constraints of day-to-day security threats and compliance upkeep.
Across industries, companies of all sizes are facing unprecedented levels of expense and business risk as they attempt to combat a new evolving and expansive threat landscape. Accenture found a 200% increase in levels of disruption from 2017 to 2022, with organizations failing to keep pace with the scope and scale of cyber risks.[1]
On the compliance front, enterprises are spending up to $10,000 per employee[2] to maintain compliance obligations in the face of new regulations, leading to a 30% expected increase in compliance-related operating costs over the next two years.[3]
What’s more, according to Accenture[4], 90% of compliance leaders expect evolving business, regulatory, and customer demands to increase compliance-related operating costs, and keeping up with the constant spate of changes is proving to be a significant challenge.
Poor visibility due to system limitations, tool proliferation, and cost constraints remains another major hurdle to meeting security and compliance objectives. The average enterprise maintains 45 security tools from more than a dozen vendors, and the lack of centralized controls creates visibility gaps while impeding the ability to leverage AI and automation for efficiency improvements. Similarly, there’s no good way to achieve real-time visibility into the compliance status of both internal controls and digital assets. Without a complete picture, enterprises struggle to understand security and compliance posture, leaving themselves exposed.
Shortages of specialized skills abound, and continued reliance on manual troubleshooting, triaging, researching, and response work for both cybersecurity and compliance is time consuming, compounding enterprise vulnerability. With enterprises mired in the manual work of security and compliance, resources are diverted from high-value business imperatives such as digital transformation and modernization.
Failure to address the on-going complexity puts the C-suite and board in the crosshairs of accountability, while amplifying companies’ exposure in the event of a catastrophic cyber event. The advent of GenAI can help organizations automate many of these critical functions, promoting efficiencies, driving down costs, and successfully mitigating business risk.
“GenAI, specifically when it comes to cyber resilience and threat detection and response, can play an immediate role in ‘up leveling’ existing talent as well as significantly contribute to operational time savings,” says Tony Harris, Global AWS Security Business Lead at Accenture.
AWS and Accenture partner to bridge the gaps
AWS and Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG) are at the forefront of leveraging GenAI to solve enterprise security and compliance challenges. On the cybersecurity front, Accenture Security Flywheel couples single pane of glass visibility with GenAI capabilities to simplify, centralize, and automate cyber resilience, in turn accelerating responses, improving malware and threat explainability, and enabling Security Operations Centers (SOCs) to react more quickly and efficiently than before. Security Flywheel ingests log data from multiple CSPs, SIEMs, and ISVs, providing easy rationalization of alerts from multiple sources to create a holistic view. The accelerator, built on an Amazon Security Lake foundation and leveraging the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework (OCSF), helps close visibility gaps and weed out signal exhaust noise.
GenAI capabilities powered by Amazon Bedrock automate response processes and upskill SOC talent, enabling personnel to deliver better-quality insights and increasing overall effectiveness. Customers report a 90% reduction in time spent writing reports, SOAR playbooks, and change tickets in addition to a 70% bump in decision-making speed during incident response and the triage process, Accenture found. With SOCs spending less time tracking down threats, resources can be redeployed to higher value digital transformation initiatives. “The GenAI accelerator enables a less experienced security or compliance analyst to bridge common knowledge gaps, enhancing their impact,” Harris explains. “From a talent perspective, it eliminates some of the steps and knowledge needed for research [and training].”
The partners are actively collaborating to bring similar automation and simplicity to compliance efforts. The Accenture Continuous Compliance (AC2) accelerator is also built on Amazon Security Lake and aims to help automate real-time controls mapped to regulatory standards along with compliance reporting for C-suite stakeholders. AC2 adapts in response to on-going changes in regulations, AWS service offerings, and changing workloads and environments, reducing manual intervention and compliance overhead. The models developed are orchestrated by the AWS Bedrock GenAI and can facilitate the remediation of non-compliant controls and technology assets.
AC2 delivers significant benefits, including a reduction in non-compliance findings and aiding in a 95% reduction in manual effort and associated time savings, according to Accenture. C-suite and enterprise stakeholders gain a 360-degree view into compliance status in near real-time, boosting confidence and helping accelerate growth and digital business initiatives.
With both GenAI accelerator solutions, Accenture and AWS customize deployment to meet customer needs while still delivering value in weeks, not months.
AWS and Accenture partnership advantages
The partners each bring a deep bench of skilled experts with an emphasis on security and cloud know-how to accelerate business value. Accenture is a proven AWS partner with 32,000+ AWS certified practitioners with coverage of 30+ AWS competencies. The partners’ highly aligned execution focuses on mature accelerators, delivery tools, and methods to address joint customers’ toughest challenges.
Security Flywheel and AC2 are part of Accenture’s integrated, mySecurity portfolio, a set of end-to-end genAI-powered assets built with partner technologies aimed at strengthening a security foundation across cloud, identity, applications, platforms, network, and security operations. mySecurity services cover the full spectrum of needs, from development of resilience and compliance strategies all the way through securing cloud infrastructure and delivering managed services.
Security and compliance non-conformance can be major business disrupters. Accenture and AWS are partnering to leverage GenAI and other advanced technologies to boost efficiencies and drastically mitigate enterprise risk.
To learn more about Accenture cybersecurity services, visit us today.
[1] Accenture State of Cybersecurity resilience 2023
[2] https://cei.org/studies/ten-thousand-commandments-2021/
[3] https://www.grandviewresearch.com/press-release/global-enterprise-governance-risk-compliance-egrc-market
[4] https://www.accenture.com/hk-en/insights/consulting/compliance-risk-study