Business Continuity Implications for SOX Compliance
SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) requirements include several steps organizations need to take to ensure business continuity across the entire IT infrastructure, even in a mixed environment that includes a virtual environment.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 is the federal law enacted as a result of the many corporate financial scandals of the early part of the century, and it was signed into legislation to protect shareholders and the general public from accounting errors and risky, fraudulent activities.
The act is enforced by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and requires organizations to manage and store their records – including electronic records and messages – for no less than five years. Penalties for non-compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) include heavy fines, imprisonment of not more than 20 years, or both. Since electronic records needed to be easily accessible for audits or simply to answer a question related to an audit, the burden falls to the IT department to ensure that the IT infrastructure is in alignment with SOX audit requirements.
See Business Continuity Implications for SOX Compliance, by Andrew Barnes for Financial Tech Spotlight.
Tags: compliance, governance, regulatory, Sarbanes-Oxley, SOX
