IT Risk Assurance

In today’s business world, IT environments are becoming increasingly complex while even greater reliance is being placed on them as part of business process operations, controls, performance and management reporting.

Our IT systems & Projects Assurance practice helps clients realize the complete value of their strategic technology initiatives and increase comfort over implemented IT solutions, through the effective management of risk in the following areas:

• IT systems implementation assurance, including:
  • independent quality assurance throughout entire project lifecycle
  • support of projects design and initiation
  • targeted project reviews and audits, based on risk assessment
• Business system and information related risks, including:
  • security configuration, segregation of duties and restricted access to critical system functions
  • process automation and control optimization
  • business information delivery
  • data management, analysis and assurance

b) IT systems and data assurance

The pace of IT change, regulatory pressures and increasing dependency on IT represent a significant challenge for companies. IT systems must be fully available and reliable to enable business processes to run smoothly, in well controlled and transparent manner.

Information has become a critical factor for business strategic and operational management. Customers, partners, suppliers, employees and investors all require that data and information be confidential and inviolable, but also reliable and available for reporting and management purposes.

Many organisations report and make decisions based on information which is unreliable, inconsistent and misleading. There is an increasing burden of external reporting and compliance - be it from shareholders/investors, customers/suppliers, Regulators, Government bodies/departments and NGO's.

Also internal controls systems are more and more dependent on IT systems, with increasing ratio of automated and semi automated / IT reports based ones. Reliance of internal controls systems require reliance on IT systems as well, while increasing number of automated controls improve effectiveness of the controls environment and reduce its costs for the organization.

We add value throughout the IT systems and data related risk and solutions arena by:

• Helping companies identify IT systems related risks and understand their impact,
• Scrutinising ERP and business systems on various levels to provide assurance on governance, implementation, data migration, interfaces and overall alignment with business objectives,
• Providing assurance that a robust control solutions are in place to manage IT systems risks, including process improvement, controls optimisation and providing internal comfort that performance information is reported correctly,
• Evaluating potential risks of undetected errors, fraud, or material misstatement to the financial and operating data, including cases when business functions and users have incompatible, elevated or powerful access to the system,
• Optimizing the implementation and configuration of third party compliance tools, such as SAP GRC,
• Providing independent assurance, including third party assurance using defined reporting standards, over the process, controls, reports and data used to manage the business and deliver external performance information,
• Providing independent assurance over data and information quality.

Businesses will see direct benefits as a result of implementing these solutions, for example increased reliability of the internal controls system and information, a reduction in risks associated with both: daily business and compliance combined with improvement in the cost-benefit ratio.