SOX Compliance Audit.

The Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 is the legislative response to the corporate financial scandals of Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom. Designed to restore trust in financial practices, SOX established rigorous Sarbanes-Oxley internal controls to enhance transparency, strengthen accountability, and prevent fraud across corporate operations. It introduced stringent Sarbanes-Oxley controls for accountants, auditors, and corporate officers, with strict record-keeping requirements that support SOX compliance for IT systems and business processes alike.

Organizations must implement effective controls SOX frameworks, including enforced segregation of duties and regular ITGC audit procedures to safeguard financial data integrity. SOX regulations and enforcement policies significantly strengthened existing securities laws and enhanced other requirements enforced by the SEC, creating a foundation for ongoing monitoring and audit standards critical for sustained compliance.

SOX made reforms in four areas:

Corporate
responsibility

Increased criminal punishment

Accounting
regulation

New
protections

Who does SOX compliance apply to?

SOX applies to all publicly traded companies in the United States, their subsidiaries, and publicly traded foreign companies doing business in the United States. SOX also regulates accounting firms that perform SOX audits. If your company falls under one of these classifications, you are subject to data security and controls requirements, as stipulated by SOX.

What are SOX Controls?

A SOX control is a rule that prevents and detects errors within a process of financial reporting. The purpose of these controls is to ensure accurate and reliable financial reporting.

Common controls for financial applications are related to system access, segregation of duties, change management, and data backup. The challenge is designing controls for your business processes, IT systems, and networks to meet your control objectives.

SOX Compliance Audits

SOX audits require that record collection, auditing, and monitoring solutions provide a complete audit trail of access and exchanges with sensitive data. Sections 302, 404, and 409 require strict auditing, recording, and monitoring of:

Internal controls – Access Controls, IT Security, Data Backup, Change Management
Network and database activity
Login, account and user activity

Benefits of Compliance for a SOX Audit

Improved control structure – Helps companies establish a control framework, streamline documentation and reliable financial reporting
Improved risk management – Compliance provides a consolidated view of risks and transparency in processes
Improved operational performance – ensures that the risk management, governance, and internal control processes are effective
Helps prevent cyberattacks and data breaches – mandatory data safeguards and procedures help ensure that data is safe from bad actors

How SafePaaS can help ?

Preparing for a SOX audit can be a daunting and overwhelming process, but the process can be made less stressful with the right solutions in place. SafePaaS provides a comprehensive solutions platform that delivers automated solutions to address all your SOX compliance requirements.

ERP systems like Oracle ERP Cloud and SAP are at the heart of any organization. These key systems store sensitive information and data that must be protected from internal and external threats, as well as from continually emerging threats. SafePaaS integrates seamlessly into any ERP system (or SOX application) to automatically monitor users and identities to identify risks.

Advanced analytics

Access analytics is a key component of an enterprise access governance solution, as it can improve the effectiveness of controls and provide real-time insights to mitigate emerging threats. SafePaaS customers use access analytics in many ways and rely on the results to protect their businesses against cybersecurity risks and insider threats from access policy violations.

Comprehensive Repository of Segregation of Duties

SafePaaS provides a comprehensive catalog of patented controls with over 1,000 rules, automatically detecting roles and responsibilities with inherent violations, per SOX mandates. These comprehensive controls have been used for over ten years in more than 800 customer environments. We can also provide over 1,000 additional configuration and transaction rules for popular enterprise applications, tested by audit firms, including the Big 4.

Access risk mitigation

SafePaaS enables users to quickly identify and remediate policy violations. This is done by reviewing access, ensuring identity deprovisioning is timely, and enforcing zero trust. SafePaaS can respond to risk in real time to protect organizations from SoD, data protection, and cyber risk.

Ready-to-use integrations

SafePaaS provides out-of-the-box integrations for incorporating advanced access controls into identity management and IT service management. SafePaaS is compatible with ServiceNow, Okta, Azure AD, SailPoint, and many others.

Continuous monitoring

SafePaaS automatically identifies and remediates high risks by continuously monitoring any ERP, application, cloud platform, operating system, and database.

Segregation of duties between applications

SafePaaS provides cross-application SoD between financial systems and any vertical solution, as well as IGA and ITSM solutions.

Get in Touch with Our Team

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