Accenture Federal Services’ Gus Hunt: Data-Centric Security Key to Cyber Resilience

Gus Hunt, cybersecurity strategy lead at Accenture’s federal services business, has said adopting data-centric security approach could help agencies protect data, maintain control of networks and achieve cyber resilience.

Hunt wrote in a Nextgov piece posted Monday that agencies should develop a framework for data tagging and marking in order to facilitate the decision-making process when it comes to automated access control and access permission services.

“You also want to ensure your data is encrypted at rest and in transit. Make this the default condition for all data and systems,” he added.

He noted about the importance of identity and access management services to data, applications, devices and networks and suggested the use of blockchain-like processes to ensure data integrity.

Agencies should implement segmentation and tokenize sensitive data as well as store and encrypt tokenized representations and real data in various systems, Hunt said.

“Be consistent in how you tokenize to ensure that analytics and other advanced computations can be calculated correctly,” he added.