Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX)
Aligning Security Best Practices and Proactive Risk Management with Your Organization's SOX Objectives
The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is designed to protect investors by improving the accuracy and reliability of corporate disclosures made in accordance with securities laws. SOX standards must be followed or strict penalties for noncompliance can result. The federal government continues to refine SOX mandates, and in 2007, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved a new auditing standard for internal controls. As a part of this new standard, the SEC and PCAOB are encouraging auditors to consider a risk-based approach in evaluating the internal controls over financial reporting of public companies.
This new standard requires going beyond monitoring security events from the network level. Now you should monitor and secure compliance-related data and applications throughout your enterprise by monitoring at both the application level and network activity level. Monitoring user activity is particularly important for maintaining separation of duties, and most important of all, for adopting a true policy-driven security program. These urgent needs can be met with a security information solution from netForensics. With the right decision support strategy, you can:
- Continuously improve your security posture
- Track and prove your success in measurable risk reduction
- Put in place auditable internal controls that include logs, incident reports, alerts, and IDM systems, as well as application session information from across your entire organization on different platforms
While there's no "silver bullet" for SOX, there’s a core set of enablers—security compliance management solutions from netForensics.
New Challenges for Auditors
So how do the new guidelines affect auditors? The SEC and PCAOB want auditors to focus on important internal controls that can reduce the risk of fraud or material error. At the same time, auditors are encouraged to consider outside assistance, like security management solutions that can provide key audit support, such as audit-ready reports. Security management solutions, in fact, can provide more scalability to audits—especially beneficial to smaller companies. A properly implemented risk-based approach to auditing for SOX compliance can make SOX more manageable, reduce the associated cost, and enhance its effectiveness in ensuring adequacy of controls and the integrity of financial reporting.
Ongoing Sarbanes-Oxley Challenges for Organizations
And how do the new guidelines affect you? While this new regulatory guidance is intended to provide some regulatory relief, it doesn’t minimize or eliminate your obligation to implement prudent internal controls. You are still required to:
- Prove diligence in managing information security risk through detailed documentation so you’re continually prepared for any potential audits
- Monitor and protect your financial databases, down to the record level, and secure financial data as it moves throughout applications that consume that data
- Centrally collect and store audit trails from financial databases and applications and correlate them with network security devices
- Implement identity management systems so that you can recognize and prevent both internal and external security threats to financial systems before they result in a material weakness
- Respond rapidly to material events such as a data breach, notifying appropriate parties and taking remedial action
Security Compliance Management—Enabling IT Control for SOX
netForensics security
compliance management solutions offer a cost-effective approach to proactive
risk management across your network, systems, applications, databases, and user
activities—while
enabling SOX compliance. Properly implemented, a best-practices security compliance
management solution can provide you reliable, end-to-end security monitoring
and incident management processes surrounding financial applications and data,
and the IT systems that support them.
By deploying an effective security compliance management solution, you’re equipped with a full range of tools that support SOX compliance objectives. But whether you’re beginning to explore the importance of collecting and analyzing log data, enhancing your security practices to protect your applications and databases from inside threats, or need real-time actionable security and SOX compliance information throughout your enterprise, netForensics can help you meet all your SOX security compliance management challenges.
nFX One: Helping You Maintain SOX Compliance While Securing Your Enterprise
netForensics nFX One is a streamlined yet robust security
compliance management suite that empowers you to continuously manage risk while
leveraging recognized security best practices. Through data collection, log management,
real-time monitoring, threat identification, rapid response, and actionable reporting,
you can tackle information security and SOX compliance at the same time with
nFX One solutions:
- nFX SIM One,
for Security Information Management, empowers you to
transform huge volumes of complex security-related data
into understandable, actionable information. This streamlined,
easy-to-deploy SIM solution allows you to respond to
security events in real time—for active compliance management from the perimeter to the core. nFX SIM One’s new Security Audit Framework delivers unprecedented guidance and knowledge support to help you in your efforts to achieve compliance with multiple regulations and standards.
- nFX Data One for
Database Threat Management, delivers a new level of insight
into user activities, so you know who’s touching your critical data and what they are doing with it—at all times across your enterprise. nFX Data One protects your organization from data breaches by monitoring databases and applications and alerting on any hostile and unauthorized activity.
- nFX Log One for
Log Management, enables easy-to-use log management
for collecting, documenting, and storing log data for
compliance audits. With broad access to your log data—plus the power to take action on it when necessary—you can effectively meet your compliance demands while enhancing your overall information security posture.
Learn more about achieving and maintaining SOX compliance through proactive threat and risk management.
Download: SOX Reloaded: Essential Practices for Successful Compliance.
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