Customer Success Manager
Table of Contents
If there’s one thing that makes SOX compliance officers smile, it’s effective IT general controls. However, the way towards ITGC compliance means months of multi-stakeholder meetings, IT department interventions, and expensive, specialist man-hours.
The complexity and likelihood of human errors involved in manual ITGC monitoring keep the risks that these controls aim to eliminate well in place.
How Does a Typical Organization Currently Audit ITGC?
A typical ITGC audit preparedness process goes something like this:
- Management teams discover the need to create IT General Controls, as part of their SOX compliance readiness.
- Various reports, extracted from relevant IT systems, as well as the required IPEs (Information Produced by the Entity. Usually a screenshot) are transferred bit by bit to the ITGC consultants. Needless to say that these are produced after running numerous requirement clarifications meetings with them. Each IT system is discussed and treated separately.
- Weeks roll by as stakeholders focus on important daily priorities. Urgency grows as SOX compliance deadlines approach. Lots of emails are exchanged.
- Finally, the ITGC consultants create manual working papers, (usually excel documents) one working paper control per system. Assuming no human error has crept into the manual process, then ITGC are considered “effective”.
- Stakeholders return to their desk, long-term ITGC monitoring may or may not be ignored, and the process will repeat itself when the next audit date approaches.
- The risks, cost, and timescale involved in such a repetitive and inefficient process are huge.
How to Audit IT General Controls Simply? Embrace Automation.
Nobody’s pretending ITGC readiness and compliance are easy. Moreover, the more digitally-enabled businesses go global, the more controls auditors need to make sure are effective.
A lot of organizations have managed to automate and simplify many business processes. Digital transformation projects are widespread. Yet, when it comes to ITGC and compliance monitoring, nobody seems to be hitting the ‘automation’ button.
Today, there are simpler, faster, more cost-efficient routes towards continuous monitoring of IT General Controls. Maintaining the outdated methods and manual complexity simply doesn’t make sense. There are better ways.
Imagine having the ITGC independence to produce recognized ITGC documentation in-house. Now imagine reports extracted automatically from IT systems, without IT-team intervention, plus an online dashboard with the ITGC status and statistics that let the SOX compliance officer know where things are at any given moment. There is no need to imagine – this is a very real possibility with AudITech’s SaaS solution.
AudITech’s software can minimize the compliance and financial risks of complex and manual IT audit projects, without the need for a long and tedious implementation process. Our solution eliminates so many potential human errors and oversights. We let you integrate all your IT assets into a single online dashboard, with continuous monitoring and useful statistics, so that you can forget about endless email iterations with control owners or the IT team, and invest your precious time on other things.
Once our solution is in place, IT audits and SOX compliance become streamlined, background processes, rather than a burdensome project that creates spiraling cost and annual risk. ITGC should be a continual business process, not a pop-up project performed at the last minute.
Start With an AudITech Demo.
If you’re a newly listed company facing SOX compliance requirements or an organization aspiring for greater compliance efficiency, don’t go down the manual route of annual ITGC complexity.
Ask us for an AudITech demo. We will show you how to securely integrate your IT systems with our platform, how to audit any of them in just a few minutes, and how simple, smart and valuable IT audits can be.
