Manage, Control and Protect Spreadsheet Integrity

• Locate and catalog all financial and business sensitive spreadsheets
• Track changes to spreadsheets and discover inappropriate distribution
• Protect spreadsheets from unauthorized access
• Maintain complete spreadsheet histories for audits and “point-in-time” version recovery
• Implement best practices and policies for spreadsheet control across the organization
• Strengthen compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory mandates
• Automatically move spreadsheets to the most appropriate storage resource
• Leverage a single solution across your diverse management and compliance projects

The Spreadsheet Control Challenge

Your company uses spreadsheets extensively to make decisions, share information and do financial reporting.  So it’s is essential to protect their integrity.  Section 404 of Sarbanes Oxley, in particular—as well as many other regulatory mandates worldwide—require you to implement appropriate controls for financial and business related spreadsheets.  Without such controls, the accuracy and integrity of business decisions and financial statements can easily be compromised—exposing your company to substantial risks that include loss of business, financial penalties, and even criminal prosecution.

In a typical corporate environment, however, spreadsheets quickly assume a life of their own.  Different versions of a single spreadsheet can multiply rapidly in days—if not hours—as employees add new data and test various “what if” scenarios.  These different versions are then quickly shared, copied and emailed between users.  File names and formats are frequently changed.  Soon, hundreds of variations on a single spreadsheet can wind up scattered across your environment—making it virtually impossible to properly apply appropriate access and version control policies to them.

So how can you identify and gain better visibility into all of the financial spreadsheets that proliferate daily across your company?  And how can you implement effective spreadsheet control policies that protect the integrity of your financial and business data and ensure regulatory compliance?

The Nogacom Solution

Nogacom delivers a solution and methodology for cost-effectively safeguarding your spreadsheets—so you can better protect your company from a wide range of business risks and comply with regulatory requirements.

Assess your Spreadsheets.  First, with NogaLogic, you can automatically identify and classify your financial and business spreadsheets—and get a clear understanding of how they are being used across your organization.  Through this process you will:

• Identify all financial and business spreadsheets across the organization by their business value - including copies and versions – and see where they are stored
• Easily differentiate key financial or business-related spreadsheets (such as P&L statements) from less critical ones (such as employee expense reports)
• Compare the differences between different versions and even see changes made to the same version to uncover errors in input, logic, or calculations
• See who accessed or changed a spreadsheet, and when those events occurred, and to whom they were distributed - inside and outside your company
• Track current user permissions on all spreadsheets to identify inappropriate access rights

Define your spreadsheet control policies and set controls.  Once you have this granular visibility and full understanding of how spreadsheets are used across your organization, you can centrally define policies that control access to and distribution of spreadsheets based on your company’s security and/or regulatory requirements. For example, you can set policies that automatically move specific spreadsheets to pre-defined secure locations. You can define a policy that ensures that all copies or versions of a sensitive spreadsheet are stored in a specific repository that is exclusively used by the finance department.  Or you can define a policy that automatically archives old employee expense reports to tape. And you can set a policy that limits access or distribution of certain business sensitive spreadsheets to specific, authorized personnel.

Enforce and monitor.  Once you have defined your spreadsheet control policies, NogaLogic will then automatically implement them. Furthermore, NogaLogic will continue to automatically apply your policies to any relevant new or updated spreadsheets on an ongoing basis.  In addition, NogaLogic provides an audit trail for each spreadsheet—including date created/changed, author, and storage location—so you can document your compliance with regulatory mandates.  This audit trail can also be used to identify specific changes made to spreadsheets for forensic and analytical purposes.

NogaLogic can integrate with third-party access and security control products, so you can create a seamless and complete environment for the enforcement of spreadsheet policies.

Measure your success.  After the initial implementation of your spreadsheet control policies, NogaLogic will help you to continually understand how spreadsheets are used and protected across your company. For example NogaLogic can identify and alert you to any new business-critical spreadsheets, so that you can then adjust policies and/or business processes to ensure that these spreadsheets are used and protected in accordance with your business and regulatory requirements.  You can also use NogaLogic to modify your policies to quickly and cost-effectively as necessary to respond to new regulatory mandates and changes in the structure of your organization, such as M&A activity.

To start better protecting your company’s business sensitive spreadsheets and ensure regulatory compliance contact Nogacom today >>>