We’ve talked about SAS 70s in previous posts (What is SAS 70 and who needs it? and Types of SAS 70 Services), but where will your organization see a real benefit?

Efficiency and Cost Reduction – Your company can have one audit performed and provide one report to interested parties.  This allows your company to focus on what it does best and reduces the time required to respond to audit inquiries.

Piece of Mind – It makes good business sense to make sure you have controls in place to prevent/detect unnecessary mistakes, unauthorized transactions, unauthorized modifications to data, and fraudulent activity.  Having an independent party assess your processes and systems can provide a level of assurance that may be unattainable through self assessment.

Strengthen Existing Relationships – Customers value transparency and assurance that your processes and systems are sound.

Attract Customers – New customers want to know that they will be working with a company that has standards in place and has been reviewed by an independent party.

Differentiate from Competitors – If your company has a clean audit opinion and your competitors don’t or don’t have an audit opinion at all, you should stand out in the marketplace.

Compliance – There may be overlapping regulations that a SAS 70 may meet.  The Sarbanes Oxley Act requires your customers to have controls over financially material processes and systems. The Graham Leach Bliley Act requires financial institutions to provide security over customer information to safeguard their privacy.

Are you interested in strengthening existing relationships, attracting new customers and differentiating your company from competitors?

Do you want to reduce the time and cost of audit inquiries?

Tags: Business Process Audits, Change Control, Compliance, Data Center and Network Operations, Data Privacy, Information Security, Internal Controls Reviews, sas 70 audit report, sas 70 virginia

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 8:55 am and is filed under SAS 70. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.