Windward has provided various companies with the vital technology they needed in order to adhere to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. Section 404(b) of this act states that most public companies need to establish internal controls over financial reporting. Consequently, many organizations have had to adapt their IT infrastructure to manage, control and monitor the assets, revenues and expenses that impact their financial statements.
As an example, Windward recently completed an engagement to restructure a service provider's provisioning and peering database system. As this system captured the provider's network equipment, provisioned customer circuits and all peering agreements with partner providers, the integrity of its data was critical to Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance. Each of these IT assets had a direct impact on the company's financial statements, through attributes such as the value of each asset, the cost to support each circuit, the revenue associated with each circuit, and revenue and cost sharing with partners. However, with its existing home-grown inventory system, the organization did not have in place many of the controls to ensure accurate financial reporting. Missing controls included a proper user authentication and access control mechanism, the ability to audit changes, business rules that ensured asset relationships were sound and accurate and integration with order entry and billing systems for revenue integrity.
To put the service provider on the path to compliance, Windward rebuilt the provisioning, asset and peering databases with the proper business rules. In conjunction with the provider's network experts, we accurately modeled all network circuits and developed system logic and constraints to ensure all configuration item relationships were correct. Windward then enabled process integration to maximize accuracy of data through two-way integration with the provider's order entry and billing systems and automating network discovery integration with the databases. Finally, Windward enabled the critical control components of defining administrator and user roles, enforcing authentication by specific authorized users and logging all activity by these users. Windward was able to deliver to its clients not only assistance in achieving SOX compliance, but also provide valuable and trustworthy expertise to achieve the critical task of implementing financial controls.