Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Sarbanes-Oxley Documentation for Administrators

Like most pieces of legislation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (known as SOX) is quite lengthy and involved. In a nutshell, all financial data and reports must be accurate, agreed to (and signed off on) by those who are paid to oversee them, and they must be maintained for historical and audit purposes.

IT figures into this equation in the section of the Act known as 404 (see http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2003-66.htm). This section implies that there should be internal controls on the data and reports to assure that they are safe, uncorrupted, accurate, and so on. If a company is large enough to be publicly traded, and it keeps its data on elaborate computer systems, then suddenly it is up to the administrator and IT department to be able to prove that measures are in place to keep the network secure and tojustify everything that is done to and with data.

It is not enough to know that data is secure, or even to say that it is secure — you must document that it is secure. Audits are then done to verify that the proper measures are in place to make certain the data is secure. The following tips will help you understand what should be documented.

Sarbanes-Oxley Documentation for Administrators

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