Today, Accenture (NYSE: ACN) and SandboxAQ have announced that they are expanding their partnership to address the critical need for enterprise data encryption that can defend against current data breaches, as well as future AI and quantum threats. Together, Accenture and SandboxAQ are helping organisations secure sensitive data and strengthen encryption across their technology portfolios. The joint offering will also provide observability across environments to help increase enterprise resilience and lower impact from third party risks.
More than half (52%) of CEOs consider the accelerated pace of technology innovation a top risk for cyberattacks, with 86% rating cyber trust and resilience in emerging technologies like generative AI and quantum computing as highly relevant for their organisations, according to research from Accenture.
The research serves as a reminder that strong cryptography management, requiring the latest algorithms to protect systems, processes and data is a foundational pillar to defending against evolving cyber threats. As part of an ongoing commitment to cryptographic excellence, Accenture is introducing a new Encryption Risk Assessment service, integrated with SandboxAQ’s AQtive Guard. The service provides clients with deep visibility into risks caused by weak cryptography before these risks have a chance to impact critical data across networks, file systems, and cloud applications.
Paolo Dal Cin, global lead of Accenture Security, said: “The prevalence of generative AI, as well as expected new global post-quantum encryption standards, makes data protection absolutely critical to safeguarding confidential business information and data used to train AI foundational models or used in AI applications. The reality is that malicious actors are stealing sensitive data now, with the intention of decrypting it later using quantum computers that can break many current encryption methods. Our assessment service enables clients to see potential risks to their data and upgrade encryption to increase protection against ransomware, data theft and manipulation campaigns, and to prepare for future risks from quantum computing. Companies that assess their data encryption level now will be more protected against current attacks and better prepared to mitigate future risks.”
The service can identify risks across important areas including the existence of cryptographic assets such as digital certificates or cryptographic keys, and usage of cryptographic algorithms, both symmetric and public key, as well as any other cryptographic constructions such as hash functions, for a comprehensive view of cryptography use throughout the enterprise. When combined with data security and privacy policies along with governance, risk and compliance guidelines, the assessment delivers prioritized recommendations for remediation action, enabling businesses to act with urgency and agility to protect their overall infrastructure against the most advanced and sophisticated threats, and in their transition to post-quantum technology.
“Our continued collaboration with Accenture will help our largest global 1000 clients defend themselves against advanced AI-driven cybersecurity attacks, protecting their most sensitive data today and tomorrow,” said Jack Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ. “As we help clients discover data that’s vulnerable to current and future attacks, there are many benefits from enhancing their cryptography defenses. The recent global outage from just one software update highlights the need to increase observability across the enterprise.”
Earlier this year, SandboxAQ announced that it had joined the FIDO alliance to further drive the use of secure protocols instead of passwords.
