Accounting

Auditing Perspective

In accordance with the technological revolution that has taken place throughout the globe, even the simplest of business and commercial transactions are performed within the parameters of an automated computer system. Information technology has aligned itself with commercial activity in such a way that it has become an integral part of the international business community. Hence, with benefits such as convenience, enhanced data management and augmented information sharing etc, we have also been exposed to major risks such as Network Security, Access controls, lack of audit trail and data integrity etc. (Arens, Elder, Beasely, 2010).
Now that we have established the major risks that are present, we can move on to briefly describing them from an auditing perspective. Network security is primarily concerned with the protection of a particular organizations overall network, data and hardware from external intrusion. On the other hand, data integrity ensures that files and records that are being managed within an organizations storage are not subject to issues such as bad sectors, unreadable files etc. Both of these risks can, in principle, lead to the problem of a lack of audit trail in the sense that if network security or data integrity did not exist then particular transaction details would not be reliable enough. Moreover, automated systems inherently, in accordance with ease and efficiency, reduce the number of steps that are usually required for a particular transaction and can also take upon certain authorizations, which primarily come under the authority of particular personnel, automatically. Access controls are another important threat that needs to be countered because it is one of the first lines of defense against external intrusion.

However, automated computer systems have inherently helped us to manage our data and tasks far more efficiently than any other invention. An automated system can expedite a large number of transactions, thus saving time, while also centralizing tasks in such a way so that less man power is required. This basically allows organizations to focus and develop specialist skills. The fact remains that while automated systems present more security threats, we must also realize that technology is consistently improving and evolving. Hence, better security measures are in the process of and shall continue to be developed in the foreseeable future. Thus consequently, it can be concluded with certainty that although automated systems expose an organization to a large number of risks and threats, however, the benefits outweigh the risks from a considerable margin.