Accenture’s own attack surface, made up of thousands of servers, virtual machines, cloud objects, devices, and physical workstations, is massive enough. But Accenture also frequently acquires companies with their own IP inventory, creating an even larger attack landscape.

“We’ve always had a strong security posture, but as we’ve been growing, we noticed that we had weaknesses in our defenses,” says Kristian Burkhardt, Accenture CISO. 

To achieve complete visibility of its IP estate, Accenture merged various technologies into a custom ASM (attack surface management) program. Burkhardt describes the program as “integrating a set of tools into a process” that combines penetration testing, customized scans, and attack simulations with human creativity and teamwork.