Consulting Services

Support of analysis, documentation and qualitative evaluation of IT structures to become SOX compliant.

In July 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) was passed to stem the tide of corporate bookkeeping scandals and improve financial reporting methods.

Section 404 of the SOX obliges corporations to describe, define their processes and abide by certain control procedures to mitigate the risk of falsified financial reports. This has major ramifications particularly in the area of corporate governance, which among other things requires companies to ensure they have minimized risk in IT support.

Tasks

To comply with SOX requirements from an IT governance perspective, there are three main areas where corporations have to act:

• Identification of all applications that support the relevant processes that are currently in operation and planned to go into operation
• Documentation and analysis of the structure, technology and interdependencies of these applications
• Evaluation of the IT landscape to discover risk factors and areas to improve.

alfabet provides the following consulting services to support organisations in carrying out the required tasks:

Creation of an IT-master plan

• Documentation of the relevant organization and process structures.
• Documentation of the relevant application portfolio.
• Evaluation and documentation of the existing and planned application process support

Visual representation of the structure

• Documentation of the interfaces.
• Documentation of the technical architecture.
• Support with risk assessment and security classification of the IT-landscape

Analysis of the IT landscape

• Data analysis and evaluation
• Generation of the relevant reports
• Portfolio analysis
• Support with the discovery of security gaps and potential areas of risk.

Benefits

• Transparency of business critical processes within the IT architecture.
• Clarity on risk and security factors from an IT perspective.
• Audit security.