Enterprise Provisioning
Reducing the Costs of Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance
An RSA Security Whitepaper
Abstract
In the wake of a number of high-profile accounting scandals, the U.S. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX) to reform the accounting practices, financial disclosures and corporate governance of public companies. It not only mandated that companies strengthen and document controls to prevent the commission of fraud, but it holds CEOs and CFOs legally and financially liable for complying with the act.
For many companies, the greatest challenge is not only how to comply with SOX, but specifically to be able to implement and enforce proper control and then validate the effectiveness of those controls in a cost-effective manner. One of the first and most critical controls needed to promote compliance is the ability to track who in the organization has access to what information and why. The more these user access privilege control and monitoring processes can be automated, the less money and time it will take to achieve compliance in a sustainable manner. To support compliance initiatives, organizations must be able to effectively:
- Ensure that only authorized users gain access to data,
- Protect data confidentiality, integrity and accuracy, and
- Control and monitor user activity.
Enterprise provisioning systems automate many of the key internal controls needed to help ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, as well as other regulatory requirements. These systems automatically apply policies and rules governing who can access what systems and what privileges users have within these systems to detect users who are not properly authorized, automatically manage and update user rights and privileges across the enterprise, and track changes for auditing purposes.
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