| New
company law could cost IT millions
20.09.2004 - CCL NEWS
Making IT systems compliant
with the Companies Bill, which had its second reading
in Parliament last week, could cost UK businesses millions
of pounds.
Many UK businesses would need a radical rethink
of IT systems to comply with the legislation.
"Any organisation will have a raft of existing
infrastructure, such as reporting systems, very few
of which will be
up to scratch in terms of meeting the bill's requirements," a
government minister warned.
"
Few can deliver the information within required timescales
with any accuracy without a great deal of manual overhead."
The
proposed Companies (Audit, Investigations and Community
Enterprise) Bill will have as radical an impact on
UK companies as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act had in the US.
Failure to make these investments quickly and correctly
will leave UK businesses prone to severe financial
penalties, said The IT Comissioner.
But it pointed out
that the technologies needed to ensure compliance are
also those that can allow organisations
to make business decisions more effectively.
Technologies
for compliance
Technologies identified as being key to the Companies
Bill are:
- Business process management: ensures that
specific tasks are assigned to the appropriate people
within
the organisation in a fully auditable and transparent
way. As BPM can automate tasks, it allows the organisation
to have greater control over high-risk accounting
- Disaster recovery essential for ensuring the safe
retention of key information
- E-mail management: taking
control of e-mails and the information they contain
Identity and access
management: ensuring the correct level of security
over information
and data
- Network security: preventing unauthorised access
to information and data
- Policy management: ensuring
that the right policies are in place to govern the
type of data stored, how
it is stored and how long for
- Records management:
the management of information from the moment it
is stored through to its deletion
- Search, discovery
and retrieval: Allows key documents, e-mails and
other records to be found on request..
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