Digital Transformation Consulting

Accenture faced significant challenges transitioning from on-premise infrastructure to a cloud environment, particularly around maintaining robust security in a hybrid multi-cloud setup. The company needed to address security and compliance risks that emerged as it adopted cloud services, which carried the complexity of relying on multiple cloud vendors with varying security standards. Traditional security models, designed for on-premise environments, were insufficient in accommodating the dynamic, scalable, and cloud-native services now in use.

To overcome these issues, Accenture implemented a comprehensive zero-trust security strategy rooted in an identity-centric approach, treating everything as untrusted and continuously verifying identity and roles before granting access. They adopted a cloud-native, software-defined security framework that integrated behavioral analytics and automated AI to identify anomalies more quickly and accurately across their platforms. The security model was designed to be cloud-agnostic, ensuring consistent application across multiple cloud providers like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, thus enabling robust, auditable security controls regardless of vendor.

Quantifiable results include the management and protection of access to over 1,300 internal cloud applications accessed by 624,000 employees, with more than one billion security events evaluated daily by analytics tools. Additionally, 91% of security controls are now native cloud solutions with automated prevention capabilities, significantly reducing security gaps. These tailored, multi-layered security measures have enabled Accenture to maintain continuous compliance with industry standards, achieve cost savings—running their hybrid cloud infrastructure at a lower cost than legacy models—and foster a security posture that is proactive, highly agile, and resistant to evolving threats.