SOX COMPLIANCE ASSOCIATE at Response Companies (New York, NY)

2-3 year SOX Compliance person in NY. Risk Control and Self Assesment, SAS 70. Financial Services experience a must.Please City: New York Location: DCJob Number: 0 Posted: 2010-03-15 09:12:10…

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Internal Auditor – Philadelphia Insurance Companies – Bala-Cynwyd, PA

internal audits and Sarbanes-Oxley reviews to assess… Assist in designing detailed audit plans and Sarbanes-Oxley tests based on information obtained from…

From Philadelphia Insurance Companies – 10 Mar 2010 05:21:23 GMT – job details – View all Bala-Cynwyd jobs

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Companies must be prepared for data storage compliance

Companies must account and deal for new legislation governing how information is stored on IT systems.

The EU is shortly to adopt many of the recommendations on corporate governance set out by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US, UK firms are to be expected to deal with and manage explicit guidelines on how to store email and other documents on their IT systems. IT managers should consider the necessary procedures and technologies needed for compliance now, in order ensure technology is able to deal with the new legislation.

Regulations regarding data storage at the moment are fairly lax, but there will be a huge increase in the amount of data than must be held over the next 18 months to two years.

Email archiving, the increased use of expencive write-once read-many media, information lifecycle management and content-aware storage as a few of the technologies which firms should consider for the future, though in some cases companies will simply need to improve the way they manage existing systems.

It is anticipated that new legislations will demand that an organizations’ archiving solutions must guarantee that the information they hold has not been changed, and keep it for a specific period of time before automatically deleting it.

A survey of 493 companies in the UK has shown that compliance with regulations has a high or fairly significant impact on the data storage strategies of 87% of the organisations surveyed. Back-up and recovery was also very important to the data protection strategy of 93% of organisations.

78% of organisations future storage strategy is set to include Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape technology. This may be due to the highly affordable and flexible nature of this new technology. For example, recent deployments of disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) solutions by various companies have, on average, reduced the backup window by more than 70%, from fifteen hours to less than four, yielding significant time and cost savings in tape management.

Interestingly, product features were far more important than the brand of the product, with 82% of organisations making a decision based on product features. When it came to the decision of choosing a specialist storage supplier or a general IT provider for storage solutions there was a very slight preference for specialised storage suppliers (51%) over general IT providers (49%).

This survey shows that compliance with regulations is a key driver in companies’ storage security policy and that we are likely to see more companies deploying Disk to Disk to Tape technology in the future.

All the above is fine if you are a corporate, you have an annual IT budget of £500,000 and numerous members of staff who can plan and complete such a system. Is it very easy to talk about SANs, NAS’s Virtual Tape Libaries. Organisations of this nature already have a very stable and flexible infrastructure, where it is comparably easier to implement such a system.

What about the 1000’s of smaller companies such as solicitors, accountants, medical practices and manufactures etc, which may have only 2 servers on site, but still have the same reliance on data and have to adhere to the same legislations? Backup to tape is an option, however, there is an upfront cost and a requirement for a trusted member of staff to take the tapes off site every night and store in a safe place. Can you guarantee your backup has worked, and do you really trust your long term data on magnetic media? Another option is to archive your data onto optical devices, however the cost is even more prohibitive than tape and you still need to take the disk offsite.

No doubt your data is growing quickly; recently enforced legislations makes sure of this, so why not employ a backup and archival solution which has no upfront cost, is fully automated, secure and regardless of disaster will ensure your data is always available, Offsite Backup.

Public Companies

EXT wants to know ress to regulate Publicly Traded Health Insurance Companies

Publicly traded health insurance companies present a highly uneasy balance between various constituents. Policyholders rely on their insurer to provide timely, relevant, and cost-efficient care when needed. Healthcare is a very unique product and service offering â?? you could say an anomaly â?? in the marketplace, in that it is an extremely “high leverage” offering. When customers need the product or service, they are at the mercy of the provider. If you were stranded in a desert and you came across a lemonade stand, how would you feel if the vendor charged you $10,000 for a glass of lemonade? Or if he chose not to sell you lemonade at all?

Secondly, the insurance is also a very distinct product in thes marketplace. Individual, organizational, and systemic risk can often be difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. Policyholders are constantly paying premiums to their insurer, but the insurer must be adept and ethical enough to ensure that they have the capacity to honor their pledged policies. When customers need treatment, they absolutely need to get their care at that very time. Being a publicly traded company, however, forces the management team to cater to Wall Streetâ??s quarterly and yearly earnings expectations. The source of these periodic performance measures are analysts from investment banks and research firms that are often wrong in the measuring stick that they hold company executives to. What happens when earnings expectations for the third quarter are unreasonably high? Does management “play games” with policyholders? Perhaps the insurer will no longer honor certain terms, or cut costs that prevent care with effectiveness and efficacy. Thatâ??s just a few examples of a dangerous balancing game.

On an additional note, since the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (after the Enron and WorldCom scandals), companies have been averse to going public due to the very significant bureaucratic and financial burdens of complying with SOX. Might this additional cost and burden cause publicly traded healthcare companies to pursue a more extreme version of cost cutting in order to protect the bottom-line? Other sectors, such as retail, telecom, and financial services, go through the occasional cost trimming as part of managementâ??s mandates. The nature of healthcareâ??s offerings, and its critical importance to the lives of its customers, materially elevate the sensitivity of cost-cutting measures when lives and limbs may be at stake.

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