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Microsoft has named the U.S. affiliate of accounting giant BDO as its Security Partner of the Year.

The award is one of the most prestigious in the cybersecurity services market, which means it’s a big deal for consultancies both large and small. BDO’s win is doubly notable on the account of the fact the firm is not a pure-play hacking prevention firm but rather focuses mainly on providing accounting services.

BDO is the world’s fifth largest provider of accounting services behind the so-called Big Four. The firm has 111,307 employees across more than 1,800 offices who brought in fee income of $12.8 billion during its most recent fiscal year.

Like the world’s other top-ten accounting firms, BDO has in recent years sought to expand its addressable market by moving beyond the financial services space into other consulting verticals. One of the verticals the firm is prioritizing is the cybersecurity services space.

The fact BDO nabbed the Security Partner of the Year Award from Microsoft, one of the IT industry’s most influential vendors, is a testament to its capabilities in this area. 

The firm can certainly use the proof point. Any large enterprise seeking cybersecurity services would need a very strong reason to hire an accounting firm like BDO instead of a pure-play vendor.

Microsoft awarded BDO the award for its work in two areas. 

The first area is Azure security. BDO works with clients to secure the applications and data they host on Microsoft’s Azure public cloud, which is widely used among the world’s largest enterprises.

The second area where BDO caught the tech behemoth’s attention is Microsoft 365 security. Microsoft 365, for the unfamiliar, is a solutions portfolio that includes popular software products like Office and Teams.

It’s worth noting that two other companies also nabbed Partner of the Year awards from the tech vendor in the cybersecurity category. However, those partners focus on much narrower cybersecurity projects than BDO and the awards they received reflected that limited scope.

Microsoft issues Partner of the Year awards in dozens of categories. That’s mainly a reflection of the fact that the company has a presence in almost every part of the IT industry.

“Since the launch of our strategic alliance with Microsoft, the benefits of our collaboration have been clear to both parties,” commented BDO Global boss Pat Kramer. “Our strategic digital approach, combining our global digital and business capabilities, means we are in a unique position to deliver value to our clients and to each other.”

This year, Microsoft received more than 4,000 submissions from partners eager for recognition. That means BDO likely faced a very significant amount of competition during the submission review process, which is yet another reason that its award win represents a notable achievement.

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