Accenture, working with ServiceNow, has launched AI-powered managed security services to help clients migrate from legacy tools, manage third-party and operational technology risks, accelerate compliance, and deliver faster, outcome-based cybersecurity services amid rising AI-driven threats.
Global IT services provider Accenture and automated digital workflow technology developer ServiceNow Monday said Accenture will build new managed security services combining ServiceNow’s AI platform and Accenture’s AI capabilities.
Accenture has been working with ServiceNow for a long time, particularly in the security space and helping clients with integrated risk management, said Rex Thexton, global CTO for Accenture’s cybersecurity business.
“We feel that that that business has been moving at, for lack of a better word, ‘human speed,’” Thexton told CRN. “Now with AI and all the rising threats in the landscape, it needs to move at AI speed. We’re working with ServiceNow to build a comprehensive managed service that can move at what they call ‘machine speed’ or ‘AI speed’ to help clients keep track of all the regulatory burden as well.”
Things have to change, Thexton said.
“People need to be able to move at a different speed now to keep up with the rising threats and the pace of business in order to manage third-party risk and as well as risk in general,” he said. “It also ties into operational technology risk management where we’ve made a huge investment. We feel that OT risk management is underserved. This is another area we’re looking to ‘juice,’ for lack of a better term.”
Many clients are still stuck on legacy technologies, and so Accenture built some AI-powered migration capabilities to help them migrate from legacy tools that have been around for decades, Thexton said. He declined to name specific vendors of those legacy tools.
“We think this will help them be able to move at the pace they need,” he said.
Accenture has been working with ServiceNow for a long time, but this new relationship is less about traditional consulting, systems integration or managed services and more focused on end-to-end outcomes, Thexton said.
“This isn’t a pure as-a-service model powered by the ServiceNow platform where we work with clients to provide an outcome based on results versus, for lack of a better term, ‘time and hours…’ It’s a service we can provide to clients where we take all the pain out of procurement, of buying a technology, getting someone to integrate it, and getting someone to manage it long term,” he said. “We’re providing that full outcome end-to-end.”
This used to be a very linear process, Thexton said.
“We’re looking to bring fast migration to get off legacy tech, but we’re also bringing our 20-plus years of experience into the AI, which then empowers it to be that much that much more powerful,” he said. “AI without context and knowledge will provide a generic result. We’re providing targeted, meaningful capabilities.”
Looking ahead, Accenture’s focus with the new ServiceNow relationship will be on helping clients manage their third-party risks, Thexton said.
“Supply chains are becoming more and more of an issue for clients as they’re moving faster because of, let’s call it the ‘Mythos moment’ or ‘Frontier AI moment,’” he said. “It’s really hard to track vendors and understand their supply chains, their software bills of materials, what they’re running on, and what exposure you have to them. Reducing the risk from those is super important.”
There’s also the question of European AI regulations, Thexton said.
“Reducing the time to comply with those regulations is going to be super important,” he said. “What we have enabled from an AI perspective will help clients do so in orders of magnitude faster, maybe in half the time if not less. These were all manual tasks before, very labor-intensive. This relationship is about automating a significant chunk of it. Then we can get to autonomy in the future, where we’ve automated 80 [percent] to 90 percent of that significant redundant workflow.”
Accenture already has a couple of clients on the new platform, as well as a significant and growing pipeline as businesses look to get the maximum benefits of AI with the lowest risks, Thexton said.
“We’re helping assume some of that risk and guaranteeing outcomes,” he said.
AI is coming into every domain and making things go faster, and so it is important to bring different platforms and partnerships and services together to make it easier for clients, said Michael Park, senior vice president of global partnerships and channels for ServiceNow.
“Accenture is offering an AI-powered managed security migration solution,” Park told CRN. “We go in and assess the security landscape of customers struggling with the fragmentation and the plentitude of too many software packages trying to manage it. We come with AI-powered tools to do migration off of legacy platforms and add unified risk management and a third-party managed service all backed with the commonality of the ServiceNow AI platform.”
On top of that is overlaid operational technology risk management using AI and agentic AI to constantly monitor for proactive risk management and compliance, Park said.
“So it’s a new kind of service in that we’re looking at what’s old, using agentic AI to lift and shift it into a new world as a managed service, and then using AI to manage it in a new kind of service just easier and faster to get value from. Those migrations in the old world could take years,” he said.
This process traditionally has been more manual with a lot of moving parts as the technology to automate the processes wasn’t available even a year ago, Park said.
“In just in a year’s time, we’ve now got some really cool tools that we can use to apply the technology to a problem set that’s long been managed with humans,” he said. “The automation of the migration allows us to move a lot faster to identify how to do the lift and shift, and then the managed service combined with the ServiceNow platform allows us to put it into production faster.”
What ServiceNow is offering to the partnership is a mix of existing products and technologies, including technology from its recent acquisitions of cyber exposure management vendor Armis and identity security startup Veza, along with the hooks and protocols to tie into Accenture’s technology, Park said.
“For example, Accenture’s migration services are unique to what they are doing with their installed base,” he said. “They’re hooking that into our workflow engine so their AI will identify the problem and we will do the workflow around it. The ServiceNow platform administers it, but Accenture is bringing their own IP and adding their own AI services.”
The Accenture agents go into an environment and look at the existing legacy security apps, Park said. Those agents were programmed by Accenture to look at a particular set of apps and see what it would take to move them from an on-premises environment into a managed service, including the proper protocols and the sequence of activities needed, he said.
“Accenture has built that IP in their migration services, and as the apps move over into the managed service, it hooks into the ServiceNow workflow, which begins managing the workflow of the different applications,” he said. “That’s a great example of where ServiceNow and Accenture’s AIs are working together to create a better, faster, more effective solution for customers’ pain points around security.”
