Billington Preview: Managed Security Services Change the Cyber Discussion

By now everyone probably has a good story from a Zoom call gone bad, whether it is kids playing too loudly in the background, the dog barking at a neighbor, or a microphone that refuses to work. While these annoyances exist, it is amazing that we have this technology available to us during this pandemic.

Over the past decade, public and private-sector organizations embraced cloud, collaboration, and communication technologies as part of as-a-service platforms. This shift allowed them to take advantage of new tools and innovations without the need for massive investments in infrastructure and talent.

At this year’s Billington Cybersecurity Summit, our leading cybersecurity experts will show how security is evolving in the same way. Managed security services – where organizations rent the security stack in the same way they rent cloud infrastructure or SaaS applications – provide vastly improved security at a lower cost while streamlining processes and taking advantage of constant innovation.

This is timely, as Accenture’s recently released Third Annual State of Cyber Resilience – Federal Edition found that targeted cyberattacks against federal agencies grew 53% year-over-year. While agencies performed well in defending against these attacks, it was not without cost. According to the research, three-quarters of these agencies experienced year-over-year cost increases for cybersecurity, with 60% of executives saying that these costs are unsustainable.  

An Important Discussion

As an industry leader in cybersecurity, Accenture looks forward to events like the Billington Summit where we can deeply engage with other members of the cyber community. For more than a decade the summit has provided a valuable platform for federal leaders to speak openly about their cybersecurity needs and challenges.

Our goal at next week’s conference is to listen to the hurdles our government leaders face, but also share the innovative work of our more than 7,000 cyber professionals. For example, Accenture’s FedRAMP authorized, Extended Detection and Response platform as a service (XDR PaaS), is helping federal agencies quickly grow their security maturity and competency, reducing the time to detect and remediate a threat dramatically.

XDR provides end-to-end, intelligence-driven, integrated threat monitoring and automated incident response based upon industry best practices. Instead of a Tier 1 analyst in the SOC manually managing alerts, XDR automatically handles more than 80% of these cases while only engaging Tier 2 and Tier 3 analysts of events that truly require human intervention.

This FedRAMP-authorized service provides full attack-chain visibility for continuous endpoint monitoring, proactive threat mitigation, and vulnerability protection to greatly improve visibility into a cyber ecosystem. It can provide first- or second-line defense, serving as either your primary SOC or as a strategic component of a multi-tiered defense. The cutting edge XDR client-portal not only provides streaming security metrics and visibility, it also identifies and ranks opportunities for improving a Department's security posture through its Rating of Security Effectiveness (ROSE) and Security Stack Log Coverage (SSLC) telemetry. Helping CIOs and CISOs navigate and prioritize security investments.

A Major Jump

What XDR and our other managed security services offer is the ability to make a leap in cyber capability. The implementation of managed security services allows even less mature cyber organizations to quickly take advantage of the latest cyber technologies without the need for costly investments in technology, personnel, and processes typically needed to increase cyber response levels.

Beyond significant cost and performance benefits, managed security services can also enable more collective security. Instead of going it alone, federal agencies can benefit from shared threat intelligence and best practices from their peers, other state and local agencies, and providers of critical infrastructure, such as utilities and banks. For example, Accenture manages manage more than 1 million endpoints and 30 million identities. We respond to 5 billion raw security events every day. We provide services to 94 of the Fortune 100 companies and own more than 350 cybersecurity patents. This is not to brag, but a way to say we know our stuff.

Managed security services can play an important role in enhancing your cyber resilience by allowing you to focus on the strategic threats facing your agency, not simply responding to wayward alerts. We look forward to sharing what is possible with our federal government friends next week.