Structured Records Management towards Sarbanes-Oxley Compliancy

Most of today's critical business records are created and stored in electronic form. From medical and financial records to design specifications, legal documents and e-mail. The volume of critical electronic corporate records in a single enterprise can easily dagerous levels. Yet, businesses rarely have a structured, formal means of preserving records and, when required, destroying them with full legal confidence.

The following points illustrate the records-related issues facing companies today:

1. Increasing adoption of e-business and e-government. Electronic records are being produced, copied, edited, transmitted and deleted at rates that defy conventional capture and classification methods. Businesses need a practical, effective way to properly cope with the sheer volume of business records that they've acquired.
2. Regulatory compliance. Many industries and government agencies must adhere to regulations in order to conduct their business. These regulatory requirements often mandate formal, structured recordkeeping practices of some kind. Companies that don't comply with regulations risk being penalized or limited in what they can do in that industry. For example, government agencies must comply with numerous laws regarding freedom of information, privacy and the maintenance of historical and archival records. In the commercial world, businesses must adhere to statutes concerning taxation, occupational health and safety regulations, environmental protection laws and more.
3. Exposure to litigation. Businesses today are seeking formal, structured recordkeeping for their electronic documents to demonstrate compliance with regulations and laws, and to establish strong, credible evidence of proper business conduct.
4. Information glut. Corporate and government repositories are growing larger each year, with some measured in the terabytes or even petabytes. Too much recorded information is often worse than not enough. Businesses need to know, with full legal confidence, what records they can delete and when.

Businesses must manage electronic documents in a way to reduce risk and enable demonstration of regulatory, legal and fiscal compliance.

Electronic recordkeeping provides the means by which a business can begin to demonstrate its recordkeeping accountability to shareholders, customers and regulators. e-Records software brings formal, structured recordkeeping practices to the electronic information produced or managed by business software.

Business software with e-records capability applies formal recordkeeping practices and methods to the electronic documents, which helps to demonstrate compliance with regulations, preserves critical documents necessary for future decision making and deletes information at only the appropriate time, in accordance with applicable laws, regulations and/or policies. Organizations can now preserve the business records they've determined they must keep, while destroying those permitted by law, policy or regulations. Electronic recordkeeping forms a key part of the infrastructure supporting a business's overall accountability.