Kelsey Koval, Global Alliance Manager, Accenture Cyber at Google and Kevin Butterfield, Managing Director, Accenture- Google Business Group Lead, Security, discuss their collaborative efforts at RSAC 2025. Their shared vision aims to enhance cybersecurity solutions and services, bringing the collective power of Google Cloud security products and Accenture’s global expertise to the forefront.
The video introduces Koval’s and Butterfield’s strategic perspectives on the integration of Google Cloud’s expansive security offerings with Accenture’s advanced services. Hosted by Dave Vellante, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, this segment highlights the experts’ discussion on their partnership’s impact on addressing cybersecurity challenges, including those emphasized during events such as Google Cloud Next.
Key insights from the discussion include significant advancements in cybersecurity through the merger of Google Cloud’s AI-driven products with Accenture’s strategic services. According to Koval and Butterfield, this collaboration supports clients in optimizing security implementations while ensuring robust defenses against evolving threats. Their emphasis on innovation within security operations, particularly through the Google Unified Security platform, underscores the shift toward simplified yet comprehensive cybersecurity solutions.
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Kevin Butterfield, Accenture & Kelsey Koval, Google
Kelsey Koval of Accenture Cyber Google and Kevin Butterfield, managing director and global lead of cybersecurity at Accenture, discuss their collaborative efforts at RSAC 2025. Their shared vision aims to enhance cybersecurity solutions and services, bringing the collective power of Google Cloud security products and Accenture’s global expertise to the forefront.
The video introduces Koval’s and Butterfield’s strategic perspectives on the integration of Google Cloud’s expansive security offerings with Accenture’s advanced services. Hosted by Dave Vellante, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, this segment highlights the experts’ discussion on their partnership’s impact on addressing cybersecurity challenges, including those emphasized during events such as Google Cloud Next.
Key insights from the discussion include significant advancements in cybersecurity through the merger of Google Cloud’s AI-driven products with Accenture’s strategic services. According to Koval and Butterfield, this collaboration supports clients in optimizing security implementations while ensuring robust defenses against evolving threats. Their emphasis on innovation within security operations, particularly through the Google Unified Security platform, underscores the shift toward simplified yet comprehensive cybersecurity solutions.
Kevin Butterfield, Accenture & Kelsey Koval, Google
Kevin Butterfield
Managing Director, Accenture- Google Business Group Lead, SecurityAccenture
Kelsey Koval
Global Alliance Manager, Accenture CyberGoogle
Kevin Butterfield, managing director and CFO of cybersecurity at Accenture, and Kelsey Koval, global alliance manager of Accenture Cyber at Google, join theCUBE’s Dave Vellante at the RSAC 2025 Conference. Their discussion focuses on the integration of Google Cloud’s security offerings with Accenture’s global services.
Koval and Butterfield explain how their collaboration supports clients in optimizing security implementations and building resilient operations. They also highlight the role of the Google Unified Security platform in simplifying comple...Read more
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What partnership has been formed to wrap services around security products and what products are included in this unified offering?add
"What are some benefits of combining SIM and SOAR in SecOps for improving search and investigation capabilities in the SOC?"add
What do you want to be able to say that you can't say today at RSAC 2026?add
What are your goals and aspirations for the partnership with Accenture?add
Kevin Butterfield, Accenture & Kelsey Koval, Google
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Dave Vellante
>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to Moscone West. You're watching theCube's coverage of RSAC Conference 2025. This is our fourth year, I think, here on Broadcast Alley. Stop by and see us. My name is Dave Vellante. John Furrier is here. Jackie McGuire, Jon Oltsik, the whole Cube team. Kevin Butterfield is here. He is the managing director and global lead of cybersecurity for Accenture. He's joined by Kelsey Koval, who's the Google security global alliance manager. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Thanks for having us.
Kelsey Koval
>> Thank you.
Dave Vellante
>> We are hot off to Google Cloud Next a couple of weeks ago. That was awesome. TheCube, we were like in GSI Alley and it was really, really innovative. A lot of excitement. Super excited about that, but we're here to talk about the partnership. Let's start there. Kelsey, you want to lead it off? What are you guys doing together? It's a lot of action out there in AI land.
Kelsey Koval
>> Yeah, I mean, what aren't we doing, I think it is probably the honest question. We are partnering with Accenture to wrap services around our security products. We've had, gosh, I would say we've had at least three solid years under our belt with quite a bit of success. It's been fantastic. Starting with the security products that we've had, in the sense of we think Chronicle and Security Command Center Enterprise and all of that, all the way down to this unified powerhouse, this offering that we have where everything is truly one offering, right? We've got Accenture now wrapping around, investing services.
Kevin Butterfield
>> It's an incredible story.
Dave Vellante
>> Yeah, I mean please because you've got the peanut butter and jelly, you've got the tech and you've got the global integrator.
Kevin Butterfield
>> It's incredible context, as you know, of cyber security and the landscape threats, hacking breaches every week, CEO saying this is the most important thing for running their business. What we've decided to do is come together. You have Google and all the power they bring with their product and evidenced by $5 billion investment in Mandiant and $32 billion in the Wiz announced acquisition.
Dave Vellante
>> Can't talk about that.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Can't talk about that, but it's public. Great product, powerhouse and product in AI in search and data, combining with Accenture and our services. 24,000 security professionals leading the market in security services, whether it's managed security, cloud security, et cetera. We believe in coming together, where these two powerhouses coming together, we're really a force multiplier, going to market together as one.
Dave Vellante
>> Of the things I learned at Google Cloud Next, which was interesting, is Google obviously has this massive infrastructure because of its search business and YouTube and everything else and one of the things I learned is, when that side of Google optimizes and gets more efficient. It opens up space for the Google Cloud folks to actually utilize. Whereas so much today, the conversation is around where are we going to get power? Where are we going to get space? Where are we going to get the cooling? Where are we going to put this data center? Google actually has the advantage of, it's already there. It's already built. Instead of having to worry about all that other stuff, all the heavy lifting and drayage, you can actually start to apply innovation and integration. We talk about Agents and Agentic and that's a heavy lift. Most people talk about it like, oh yeah, just throw your glove in the field and magic happens. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your integration philosophy and how you're spending time with that extra capacity that your customers are taking advantage of?
Kevin Butterfield
>> Well, it is remarkable what Google's doing. As you said, they're already there in 40 regions, 40 plus regions, $75 billion of capital investment plan for the coming year. Again, we see Google as a powerhouse in this market. Where do we integrate? Well, what we see is integrating across all of their security products. At Google Next, you guys announced GUS, Google Unified Security, which includes SecOps, Mandiant, Threat Intel, your security command center, cloud security products. We're integrating with service wrappers around each of those products, adding value from a services standpoint, from an industry lens to our clients, that can help optimize the use of that security product. Would you add anything to that?
Kelsey Koval
>> Yeah, 100%. I kind of touched on this lightly. If you think about it, Google Cloud Security, each product was kind of like a link in a chain and each one kind of feeding into the next. We talked about Chronicle, which is now SecOps today. That's that unified model. We've literally taken every single link in the chain from a security products portfolio perspective and we're now putting that into what we're calling GUS and we're saying, yes, of course we'd be lying if we said we didn't want everyone to be all Google everywhere all the time. Of course it's what we want, but we actually mean it and we're putting on the table this GUS offering, which is a very robust security portfolio. I guess it's a single product, right? It's fair to call it that.
Dave Vellante
>> Could you call it a platform?
Kelsey Koval
>> It is a platform. That's the word, but yeah, so it's a platform and we're now going in and saying, you know what, instead of buying these links in a chain, let's actually give it to you all at once and you can turn on what you need. If you don't, that's fine and you can leverage Accenture for top of the line security services, whether it be managed, whether it be for augmentation, whether it be for long-term utilization, so we don't run into non-renewal scenarios.
Dave Vellante
>> I'm glad you clarified the platform because I think the industry has moved from best of breed product and the argument was best of breed product or suites and now it's best of breed versus platform.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Platform, yeah.
Dave Vellante
>> The nuance there is platform allows you to build innovation on top of it, as opposed to having to spend all your integration time making the stuff work together. The link example that you just gave is very important because I mean, we talk about Lego blocks, but if it's simpler to take pieces, heterogeneous pieces and put them together, that allows you to build value on top.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Exactly.
Dave Vellante
>> Could you sort of validate that premise and maybe double-click on how that works?
Kevin Butterfield
>> Yeah, absolutely. Two years ago we made a decision to partner with Google. We had our own platform and it was from the Symantec acquisition from four years ago, but we made a very purposeful decision to partner on the product side of the business and focus on our services side. Just as you say, we still have a managed security services product. We refer to that as MXDR. We've ported over 200 clients to the Google SecOps platform that powers our service delivery platform. We feel really good about that and the experience of doing that 200 clients over, it must be world leading, has given us an asset to take to our clients, not just for the platform, but then as we go upstream to enterprise clients and seek to do more SOC transformation kinds of work.
Kelsey Koval
>> I was going to say, one of the things I want to add is, with Google, we focus on product. We would love to be a leading product and a leading services, but you can't do it. You can't do both. That's not what we are in the business of. We focus on providing leading security solutions, products and we rely on Accenture to come in and do services. Whether it's managed, whether it's implementation, whether it's workshops, et cetera, but the focus is this. When you buy a security product, your deployment, your start is your foundation and so it's all about investing into that foundation and that's really where we partner with Accenture. Like Kevin said, north of 270 deployments, you can't fake time and you can't fake experience. With Accenture having that amount of experience under their belt, that bench, it's really incredible to offer that to our customers, wrapped around our existing investment of our security products.
Dave Vellante
>> I want to ask you guys something. The conversation in security is oftentimes, John Furrier always says, what are you optimizing for? In security, you've got to optimize for efficacy, that's number one, but a lot of times in this industry, it's like an either or. You're optimizing for efficacy, but you're trading off efficiency. How do you guys think about that and what are you seeing in terms of ways that are achieving both of those? You have to stop the bad guys, if you will, but how are you helping? Even security's not immune from budget headwinds and economic headwinds and geopolitical, all that other stuff that creates budget constraints. Security spending, based on the data of course, is a little bit higher than everything else. The stocks are a little bit higher, the multiples are a little bit higher for good reason, but at the same time, there are constraints. How do you help customers with that?
Kevin Butterfield
>> You want me to take a crack first?
Kelsey Koval
>> Me? Sure.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Couple things come to mind, but jump in. For any given client before we start an implementation or transformation program, we meet with our clients and conduct what we call SOC transformation workshop. Understanding what is the ROI expected. What is the outcome, what is the value they're looking to achieve, not just putting in the system, but understanding the trade-offs and the risks and costs and really the ROI. That would be number one.
Dave Vellante
>> Based on their specific objectives and everything else.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Absolutely Right. Then we're going next with the emergence of AI and we see the two biggest reasons clients are slow to move to new, move to a modern technology stack, would be time to implement and cost. We are now partnering on reducing both of those. We want to offer our clients greater protection, at a lower cost, at a quicker time to get there and that's just around the quarter with Google and Accenture.
Kelsey Koval
>> Yeah, just to add. Budgets are low. The size of the security team today to manage all of these products, again, going back to that platform play, which is quite important, less time dealing with integrations and we can push that over to the side a little bit, but I mean, what Kevin's saying is important. We're moving down the path where, I know AI kind of feels like a buzzword sometimes, but it's also the most important portion, I would say everybody here at this conference today-
Kevin Butterfield
>> It's pivotal.
Kelsey Koval
>> Yeah, I was going to say, wanting to know what you're doing with AI. We're going to be leveraging AI for all types of things, from supporting deployment, to also supporting the utilization of the product within a security ecosystem. It's like, no longer do you need these teams of two, 300 people. We're going to get it down to where you can hire top quality people to help within the four walls of an organization, but also leverage the AI within the products and then the AI from the help of service providers or the partner, in this case Accenture, to come in and ensure that your foundation, again, going back to that, that your foundation of your deployment is good and strong and so that you can have confidence and reliability on your product.
Dave Vellante
>> That makes sense. If I peel the onion on time to implement and cost, the time to implement and the cost I presume, is associated with, when you think about AI, all the privacy, the trust, the governance, the guardrails that we have to put in place, the risk of not having enough skilled people. All of that increases the time to value and the cost. Is that a fair assessment?
Kelsey Koval
>> Yeah.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Yeah. Yeah. That's good. We have a range of clients as well. We have a range of clients as well. From our small medium-sized businesses, if we want to get them on a new SecOps platform, we can do that over a weekend and we have plenty of examples where we've done that. Enterprise clients, more complex clients when we're talking about security operations, traditionally that's a span of what, four to six months, but we're looking to bring that down to what, ten weeks maybe, two months maybe. Something like that. What's happening with AI is absolutely game changing and again, that's the reason we're partnering with Google. I'm biased, but we view that Google is winning this part of the game.
Dave Vellante
>> Well, I like this conversation. I go back three or four years, the cloud, the ascendancy of the cloud created what I'll call the first line of defense, but because it's a shared responsibility model, it introduced complexities. I feel like, I'm not picking on Google, I'd say any hyperscaler said, "We got this great cloud, we'll do our part and we're really good at this stuff. Good luck." I think it overwhelmed a lot of folks. You had developers learning how to shift left. Oh wow, I have to do security now. You had security people going, well, I have to be developers now. You had audit looking over your back as the last line of defense. At the time, again, three or four years ago, I said, "What are the cloud vendors doing to help solve this problem?" What I'm hearing today is, to make the SecOps, the security analyst life easier, you're addressing that problem and AI is a catalyst or an enabler of that. What are your thoughts on that?
Kevin Butterfield
>> Yeah, absolutely. I think Google has great words for all the AI they're putting into their product and Accenture is complementing into the operations around that product with AI, but I love Google's words around reducing toil, the toil of a SOC, Security Operation Center's analyst going through reports and alerts and other things and just reducing all of that toil to minimum, if not automating that, so that the SOC analyst can focus on higher order tasks.
Kelsey Koval
>> That's exactly what we do. If you really get into the SecOps offering, the entire component of SOAR is to drive automation. I mean, we talk about the SIM, actually I love to say this. I think this is the best way for anyone listening who's not as familiar with SecOps. It is the SIM and SOAR offering combined together and it literally, the SIM component, if you think about the power of Google in your personal life. What that means is you go to google.com, you look up baseball bats for the kids or something like that and you get an instantaneous response. That reliability, that confidence, that the interweb, that google.com is going to bring you an instant response out of all the data out there, boom, instant. Imagine that expectation and bring that home to the SOC. That's what we're doing with SecOps. We're bringing the power in search and investigation and we're bringing it into the SOC and that's really what we're doing. Then we're making it easier on the analyst and on the SOC by putting in automation and leveraging AI to really streamline some of that, so it's a really powerful tool. It's definitely worth demoing for sure.
Dave Vellante
>> The interesting thing that I've learned with having a more hands-on with AI, we all used to use AI, we just didn't know it. You hear in the narrative, media always goes to the negative, oh, it's going to lose jobs, maybe, but my experience has been, I got more to-dos now than ever. It's just more interesting todos. AI has actually increased my workload because I can do so much more, so many more strategic things and my backlog, it's growing and it's a good thing because it's so much more enjoyable, frankly, than copying and pasting. Last question to each of you. Kevin, I'll start and Kelsey you can bring us home. When we're here next year at RSAC 2026, what do you want to be able to say that you can't say today?
Kevin Butterfield
>> Well, I think the future's exciting for Accenture and Google together and I want to scale even more. Today we've talked a lot about the SecOps side of the security chain, if you will. I just want that to scale more and bigger and be able to tell you specific stories of where we've done that in every industry. We talked a little bit about the threat intelligence side and the Mandiant partnering. I want to do even more of that and integrate that into all of our offerings even more than we're doing today. Lastly, we're super excited about the cloud security side, the announced acquisition. I mean, these are game-changing premier investments that Google has made, that I love to be a part of and excited to be a part of and look forward to continuing to work with Kelsey and Google.
Kelsey Koval
>> Yes. Yes. Same. I mean, to be honest, can I repeat what Kevin just said?
Kevin Butterfield
>> Sure.
Kelsey Koval
>> Definitely to a T, but I want to come back and I want to continue to promote. I want this opportunity again to sit at the table and tell you what we're doing with Accenture. I love that Accenture is a partner that is actually not just choosing to, in a sense of showing up and doing the work, but it's actually investing and partaking and wrapping around our security products. We get product feedback. Our PM relationships are like, it's incredible to say, yeah I've got a PM on speed dial and I'm going to continue that. What I want to see is, simply put, continued growth. I want to continue to support our sales teams providing services that actually work. Being able to say, Accenture is here for you. The relationships are there. I mean, I think it's simply said that we want what most people who work in a partnership want, which is strong relationships, growth and just we want to have fun with it. We want to have fun with security and that's what we're doing.
Dave Vellante
>> I want to be able to talk about, not only Mandiant, but the acquisition that shall not be named and how that fits in to the whole portfolio because super excited about that. Guys, thanks so much for coming.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Thank you so much.
Kelsey Koval
>> Thank you.
Kevin Butterfield
>> Thank you.
Dave Vellante
>> All right. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back at RSAC 2025 right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.
Dave Vellante