Is Your Data SOX Compliant?

Compliance is arguably the most important word in the world of IT governance. You can agree or disagree to the requirements, but there is no way you can ignore it unless you want the Feds to make midnight knocks on your door. Most of the multi-million scams over the years have been traced back to the lack of proper safeguards and regulations that compliance brings about, and much of the compliance requirements of today are based on lessons learned from such lapses to prevent future recurrence.

An important legislation in this regard is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), which mandates tight controls over financial disclosures made by corporate, aimed at preventing accounting frauds. The legislation is the result of the various financial scandals at the turn of the century, such as Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom.

Sarbanes Oxley compliance requires the management to establish adequate internal controls and reporting methods for the dissemination of financial information, to both protect such data from unauthorized eyes and also to prevent its leakage from unauthorized sources.

A proactive data related compliance strategy would encompass:

• Effective internal controls to regulate the flow of nonpublic information that impacts financial statements. Such controls may assume the form of barriers that restrict access only to authorized personnel, tracking the movement of marked sensitive information on a 24×7 basis and so on.
• Measures in place to monitor, detect and record the disclosure of electronic information. Logs of all electronic communication, for instance, would offer evidence when things do go wrong.
• Identification and monitoring of potential risks related to the flow of electronic information, such as threat of the data being leaked through emails, security vulnerabilities and so on.
• Testing the effectiveness of the controls on a periodic basis through both in-house and third party audits, and making proactive adjustments as required. Hosting centers may be SOC 1, SOC 2 or SOC 3 compliant, as determined by independent third-party auditors. SOC 2 is more comprehensive than SOC 1 and attests to the best in class internal practices to verify security, availability and privacy in the data hosting environment, and also a suitable design. SOC 3 makes public the confidential information contained in SOC 2.

Large corporations that come under the ambit of SOX would obviously want to forge a relationship Sarbanes Oxley compliant data centers. With decades of experience and unmatched flexibility, Lifeline Data Center is your right partner in this endeavor. In fact, it would be far efficient and easy for you to leverage our decades of experience and expertise rather than try to do it yourself on-premises.

Alex Carroll

Managing Member at Lifeline Data Centers

Alex, co-owner, is responsible for all real estate, construction and mission critical facilities: hardened buildings, power systems, cooling systems, fire suppression, and environmentals. Alex also manages relationships with the telecommunications providers and has an extensive background in IT infrastructure support, database administration and software design and development. Alex architected Lifeline’s proprietary GRCA system and is hands-on every day in the data center.