Accenture & SandboxAQ enhance partnership to boost data security

Accenture and SandboxAQ are expanding their partnership to tackle the need for enterprise data encryption capable of defending against current data breaches and potential future threats from AI and quantum computing.

The collaboration aims to assist organisations in securing sensitive data and enhancing encryption across their technology infrastructures.

This joint initiative will provide increased observability across various environments, helping organisations to improve their resilience against cyber threats and mitigate the impact of risks from third-party sources. The partnership is driven by the pressing concern among CEOs, with 52% identifying the swift pace of technological innovation as a primary risk for cyberattacks. According to research from Accenture, 86% of CEOs view cyber trust and resilience in emerging technologies like generative AI and quantum computing as highly relevant to their organisations.

Accenture has announced a new Encryption Risk Assessment service, which integrates with SandboxAQ’s AQtive Guard. This service aims to give clients comprehensive visibility into risks caused by weak cryptography before these risks can affect critical data residing across networks, file systems, and cloud applications.

Paolo Dal Cin, global lead of Accenture Security, stated, "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."

Dal Cin continued, "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 Encryption Risk Assessment service can identify risks in several critical areas. These include the presence of cryptographic assets such as digital certificates or cryptographic keys, usage of both symmetric and public key cryptographic algorithms, and other constructions like hash functions. This comprehensive approach provides a full view of cryptography use throughout an enterprise. Combined with data security policies, governance, risk, and compliance guidelines, the assessment furnishes prioritised recommendations for remediation, enabling businesses to act swiftly to protect their infrastructure against sophisticated threats and adapt to post-quantum technology.

Jack Hidary, CEO of SandboxAQ, highlighted the importance of the continued collaboration. "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," Hidary said.

He added, "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."