SOX Compliance Solutions

 

The Sarbanes–Oxley (SOX) Act is a US federal law enacted to protect investors from accounting fraud and improve corporate accounting procedures. 

 

To ensure that financial documentation is truthful and transparent, SOX requires companies to implement cybersecurity mechanisms. In particular, organizations have to:

Achieving compliance can be challenging and expensive. Companies have to install new security software for SOX compliance, and employees have to prepare for SOX reporting. Ekran System is insider risk management software that helps you cover most SOX cybersecurity requirements and simplify the auditing process.

Who has to comply with SOX?

 

Complying with SOX is obligatory for a wide pool of companies operating in the United States. The list includes:

Independent auditors check companies for SOX compliance each year. They review two scopes of documentation: yearly financial statements and internal control reports. The latter describe the controls a SOX-compliant company uses to ensure the integrity and security of financial information.

 

Non-compliance with SOX results in a range of strict penalties, from removal from public stock exchanges to millions of dollars in fines and even years in jail.

 

Let’s take a look at major SOX cybersecurity controls and how you can meet them with Ekran System.

Meet SOX requirements with Ekran System

 

SOX demands that organizations implement internal controls — mechanisms and rules that ensure the integrity and security of financial data as well as protect an organization from fraud. The law doesn’t list an obligatory set of controls, so each company is free to choose what security mechanisms to implement.

 

Ekran System helps to detect, deter, and disrupt fraud and suspicious activity with financial data. Here’s how you can implement SOX compliance with our software:

 

SOX Section	Key requirements	Our offering
Section 302: Corporate responsibility for financial reports	Implementation of internal controls sufficient to keep financial data secure	See how users handle sensitive data and track changes in documentation with continuous user activity monitoring (UAM) Detect possible security violations with the help of predefined and customized alerts Granularly manage access to finances using an access control toolset Secure user credentials with a password management mechanism Verify user identities by implementing multi-factor authentication
Section 404: Management assessment of internal controls	Yearly top-down risk assessment Reporting on the efficiency of internal controls	Identify and assess risks coming from users by analyzing UAM records Generate reports with needed data using advanced reporting features Acquire an audit trail of all administrative activity with internal audit features
Section 802: Criminal penalties for altering documents	Prosecution for those who falsify financial documentation in any way	Continuous monitoring of all user activity to collect evidence of falsification Exporting of monitoring data to use it as evidence in forensic investigations

 

Improve the SOX reporting process with Ekran System

 

Annual reporting is an important part of the SOX compliance audit process. Preparing internal control reports puts security officers under a lot of stress and adds a lot of overhead.Security officers need to collect enough proof that sensitive data is secured and that nobody has tampered with it during the year.

 

With Ekran System reporting features, you can improve your reporting process by generating reports with the data you need in one click. Ekran System can automatically generate various reports, including:

 

• User activity report — Overview of the activity of a user or group of users during a particular period of time
• Alert report — List of triggered alerts and events that caused them
• Terminal server report — List of users who have accessed a particular terminal

 

You can configure any number of reports and customize them with a corporate logo and contact information. Ekran System can generate your reports ad-hoc or on a schedule.

 

Ekran System is the SOX compliance solution that helps to detect insider threats, protect sensitive financial data, and report on compliance. Ekran can also help you meet the requirements of PCI DSS, NIST SP 800-53, HIPAA, and other IT laws, standards, and regulations.