Ensuring compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) is crucial in today’s business environment. SOX aims to protect investors from fraudulent financial reporting, requiring companies to maintain accurate and reliable financial disclosures. For organizations leveraging SaaS platforms, compliance involves regular checks and detailed reporting on access management and asset changes. If your audit process slows you down, it may indicate that the wrong framework is built into your processes. Let’s see how Workato can speed up your audit process!
Key areas of audit
Access Management
Admins must efficiently run reports on the following:
- User listings: Maintain an up-to-date list of all users, including their roles and permissions.
- Role assignments: Document roles assigned to each user, ensuring they have the minimum necessary permissions.
- Permission changes: Track changes to user permissions, including who authorized them and why.
Change Management
Admins must document asset changes to ensure the access provisioning process works correctly:
- Change logs: Maintain detailed logs of asset changes within the SaaS platform, including additions, deletions, and modifications.
- Audit trails: Ensure every change is traceable to a specific user, with timestamps and descriptions.
- Review and approval: Regularly ensure that all changes on the platform were initiated by authorized persons and followed the correct approval process.
How to automate the compliance process
Automation is the key to maintaining compliance without sacrificing efficiency. Here’s our guide on how to automate the SOX compliance process for your Workato workspace:
Automated User Management
Utilize identity and access management (IAM) tools that integrate with your workspace to automate the tracking of user access and role assignments. Workato allows this via SAML JIT or SCIM. Regularly scheduled reports using the User Audit API endpoint can quickly provide an up-to-date snapshot of users, their roles, and permissions.
Change Monitoring and Logging
Workato has a built-in monitoring tool, Activity Log, that automatically tracks all changes in your workspace. You can explore this log in one of two ways:
- Log streaming: Stream all logs in real-time to external storage, and apply compliance checks at that destination point.
- Analyze action via Activity Log API: Use the Activity Log API to obtain a complete audit log of all modifications in your account. You can filter records by user, action, resource, and period. This can be used to create automation recipes and generate fully customized reports for review and audit.
Both options can also be used to set real-time alerts for critical changes.
Scheduled Audits and Reports
Set up automated audit routines that run at regular intervals. These routines can generate comprehensive reports covering access management and asset changes, ensuring all necessary information is documented and easily accessible for compliance purposes.
Wrap up
Ensuring SOX compliance for SaaS platforms is essential and should not slow you down – you can maintain rigorous compliance standards by leveraging automation while freeing up valuable time and resources. With Workato, you can incorporate these practices into your regular operations and transform compliance from a cumbersome necessity into a seamless part of your workflow. Think smart, automate your processes, and keep your focus on driving your business forward!