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Informatica for Sarbanes-Oxley
Sarbanes-Oxley is commonly viewed as a finance issue, not a systems issue. But compliance poses a great challenge for the CIO and IT organization overall in their role as long-standing keepers of corporate data. A company's ability to comply with new government mandates has a tremendous impact on how IT records, tracks, and discloses financial information. Since IT systems are used to generate, change, house, and transport data, organizations have to build the controls that ensure the information stands up to audit scrutiny.
It's the fundamental visibility and integration problems—and the scandals surrounding them—that led to the creation of Sarbanes-Oxley and the need for Sarbanes-Oxley solutions. With the new reporting requirements, companies and executives can look forward to personally certifying the financial reports their companies issue, describing and evaluating the effectiveness of internal controls, and having third-party auditors certify these findings. Senior management must have a complete, up-to-date view of all of the company's financial information. Accordingly, the IT organization must create near real-time reporting and analysis to meet requirements for greater transparency and quicker deadlines for reporting and filing.
Understanding How IT Can Make An Impact
It has become increasingly important to understand the complexities associated with integrating, processing, and presenting the information needed to comply with the new government standards. A company's information infrastructure is commonly comprised of many different types of data sources (e.g., databases, legacy, and flat files)—all of which speak a different language. IT organizations must have the ability to gather data from disparate systems, provide visibility into that data, and monitor and respond as change occurs.
Using Informatica software for accessing, integrating and auditing data, IT departments can leverage Sarbanes Oxley solutions that bring all disparate data sources into one location, transform it into a single format, and present it in a certified form for auditors. With real-time enabled products, Informatica provides a an integration solution that helps companies report quickly, meeting the most stringent reporting requirements.
Comply With Confidence
Are you positive your financials transactions roll-up to consistent accounts, customers, and timeframes? Ultimately, compliance is not just about transparency of financial transactions, it is about transparency into an organization's operating procedures and controls.
Informatica helps you to:
- Get It—Consolidating GL instances, retiring legacy systems, or building financial data warehouses using a robust data integration platform.
- View It—Report in real-time on data flows, integration processes, and metadata from any system
- Track It—Understanding your data lineage, from underlying source systems, through controls and calculations, all the way to the final report.
The Importance of Metadata
One of the most important questions that must be answered is how the data was collected and what kinds of calculations have been performed. In short, understanding the origin of the data is imperative.
Using metadata, critical information, such as who entered the data, when it was entered, if it has been modified, and by whom is easily accessible. Metadata provides the "lineage" of the content—what processes it has passed through and what history it has accumulated on the way to arriving in your financial reports. Without metadata, it's extremely difficult or impossible to say where the data came from.
All Informatica products are based on a unified architecture that leverages metadata, so that no matter where or when you view information, you can always see the lineage—where the data came from, who worked on it, and how it was transformed and calculated into what you see at your desktop.
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