Safend for Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance

Achieving and maintaining compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) remains high on the list of tasks for IT departments, which continue to invest tremendous effort and resources to meet the act's stringent data security requirements.

Section 404 of SOX requires all public companies to assess and report on the effectiveness of internal controls and procedures for financial reporting, including access and dissemination of sensitive financial information.

The growing popularity of mobile technologies has created new challenges for SOX compliance. Traditional perimeter-focused security solutions are no longer sufficient to prevent data leakage or comply with data security and privacy standards.

Safend Auditor and Protector are designed from the ground up to help large organizations meet the challenges of SOX in a timely, cost-effective manner. Safend provides enterprises with the tools to identify and limit data leakage through physical, wireless and storage interfaces, including a full audit trail.

Based on the four principles behind the most commonly-used SOX compliance framework - the Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (CobiT) - Safend solutions help organizations:

• Plan and Organize
  CobiT requires organizations to initially perform an assessment of existing infrastructure to determine strengths and weaknesses. Safend Auditor allows system administrators to collect information from each endpoint, delivering comprehensive data about which devices, ports and connections are being used or were used in the past.
   
• Acquire and Implement
  Once the SOX compliance plan has been developed, Safend allows administrators to easily create comprehensive and granular endpoint security policies. Policies are exported directly to Active Directory as Group Policy Objects (GPOs), ready to be assigned to relevant Organizational Units (OUs) and silently installed on clients. Within hours, Safend is protecting sensitive information and fulfilling critical requirements of the organization’s SOX compliance strategy.
  
  
• Deliver and Support
  Bringing and keeping solutions in-line with security and business objectives, while still maintaining compliance, is an ongoing challenge. To this end, Safend supports:
  
  Access rights management - Leveraging either explicitly-defined user accounts, or imported accounts from existing management systems, Safend defines access rights at the individual user level - restricting both access to information and data transfers to external devices, including removable storage and wireless connections.
  
  Information usage monitoring – Safend Auditor queries all organizational endpoints, locating and documenting all devices that are or have been connected. Safend Protector reports the attachment of unauthorized devices, monitors the information flow in accordance with access policies, and alerts administrators of attempted violations – while comprehensively logging for complete audit trail.
  
  Protection against threats - Safend mitigates the threat of data leakage by controlling access to every endpoint and every device, over every network or interface. Safend monitors real-time traffic and applies customized, highly-granular security policies over all physical, wireless and removable storage interfaces – detecting and restricting access to devices by device type, model or even device-specific serial number. Safend can further ensure that data is secure by encrypting any data written to removable storage devices, or by enforcing the use of hardware-encrypted flash drives only.
  
  
• Monitor and Evaluate
  To continuously monitor and evaluate system performance, Safend Protector logs and audits a wide variety of information, including:
  
  Client logs – tracks connection of a detachable device to a computer, tampering attempts, etc.
  File logs – provides file information for removable storage devices, external hard drives or CD/DVD.
  Server logs – provides information about the Management Server and administrative actions.

For more information about how Safend facilitates SOX compliance, please download the Achieving SOX Compliance with Safend Protector white paper.