Accenture opens a cybersecurity centre in Bengaluru

BENGALURU:

Accenture

has launched a global flagship

Cyber Fusion Centre

in Bengaluru to respond to new threats and vulnerabilities that clients face. The centre leverages the $31-billion company's inter-disciplinary capabilities and combines everything from strategy, innovation and consulting to implementation & trouble-shooting incidents all under one roof.

"Fusion is the key word," said Bill Phelps, managing director -- security services in

Accenture Operations

, referring to the "all under one roof" concept.

The 9,000 sq ft facility located in Accenture Operations' flagship delivery centre in the city has an innovation room, a 247 monitoring room -- a command centre that displays threat analytics visualization in real time, and a war room that is used to discuss incidents that require immediate responses and, if necessary, collaborate with Accenture's security teams in Prague, Washington and the Philippines.

It has a team of ethical hackers and professionals who are constantly manoeuvring through the dark net to try and listen to conversations that might give them some indication of intended attacks on enterprises and organizations so that proactive action can be taken.



"From a client perspective, they can play around with the full-stack ­-- apps, business processes, infrastructure layer, cloud, security along with analytics -- in this one centre," said Manish Sharma, senior MD, global delivery & solution development and BPO sales lead, Accenture Operations.

Accenture has more than 1,500 security professionals across seven delivery centres in India, serving over 50 clients across numerous industries and regions.

Accenture's security offering includes a

cyberdefence

platform that integrates a variety of capabilities, including solutions from security products companies like Palo Alto Networks, and data management and analytics firms like Splunk and Cloudera. The whole platform is offered in a as-a-service model, so that clients pay for only what they use and for the period that they use it.


"We help clients manage through the complexity. A typical large client has 50-60 discreet security vendors. It's unbelievable that the ecosystem has not consolidated the way ERP and CRM have. We have a set of vendors pre-integrated and that allows you to take other vendors out of your environment. Simplification and de-complexity is a big value for the client," Phelps said.

Keith Lippiatt, senior managing director, infrastructure services, Accenture Operations, said the security asa-service model ensure clients don't have to worry about identifying security vendors or hire a team to support these solutions. "If you look at the security space, there are 1,400 different product vendors out there. We integrate the leading set of world-class capabilities and provide clients with business outcomes. Clients can buy outcomes as against individual capabilities," he said.

Accenture said it mitigates more than 5,000 security risks every year with the help of security analytics that is capable of handling billions of events. "For many clients, we detect security incidents 30 times faster than their previous solutions," Lippiatt said.