IT Systems Validation for SOx and Regulatory Compliance

• Date: November 29, 2009
• Source: www.metricstream.com

Information technology has become a core enabler of business processes within the organizations today. As a result, companies are required to audit and validate their relevant IT systems to ensure that their business processes and underlying records comply with regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 or Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or 21 CFR Part 11(FDA). This paper defines an “easy-to-implement” framework for auditing and validating IT systems for regulatory compliance. It also identifies a best practice which calls for IT organizations and software vendors to proactively audit their software development and implementation processes on an ongoing basis to identify and correct any systemic issues to lower the cost of compliance.