Organizations are required to comply with an ever-increasing number of regulations. In the US, one of the most widely-reaching is the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, which applies to all public companies within the US.

The purpose of SOX is to ensure that investors in these public companies are protected against fraudulent activity. In order to achieve SOX compliance, an organization is required to maintain complete and transparent records of all of their financial dealings. The intention of the SOX Act is to ensure that scandals like Enron never happen again, where the company destroyed documents to prevent evidence from falling into the hands of the US Security and Exchanges Commission.

Under SOX, an organization is prohibited from destroying certain types of documents and required to retain them for a certain number of years. Each year, the organization’s CEO and CFO are required to provide a report on the company’s current financial status, and the penalties for inaccurate reporting are steep. As a result, an organization needs a high level of visibility into its financial data in order to generate correct reports for SOX.

Most Organizations Don’t Automate SOX Compliance

All public US companies are required to comply with SOX. However, the law does not specify how they have to perform the data collection and processing necessary to generate their reports. As a result, many organizations are taking a manual approach to data collection and report generation for SOX compliance. According to a recent survey, 47% of organizations are failing to take advantage of the numerous next-generation technologies that can help them to achieve and demonstrate compliance.

In the case of the SOX regulation, the main requirement is that an organization retains certain records for 5 years and ensures that they are not tampered with. Since this data collection and retention is often performed manually, organizations are missing the opportunity to decrease the overhead associated with maintaining compliance and are more likely to make reporting mistakes due to human error.

Benefits of Compliance Automation

The nearly half of organizations that are not taking advantage of opportunities to automate part or all of their SOX compliance activities are missing out on the wide range of benefits of automation. By moving work from manual processes to automated ones, an organization can decrease overhead and better manage their compliance.

• Increased Data Visibility

The SOX regulation requires an organization to have a high level of visibility into certain types of data in order to provide a certification that all of this data is correct. Manually trying to monitor and manage all of the potential stores of this data throughout the enterprise puts the organization’s compliance at risk since a simple oversight can result in important data being missed. With automated data collection and monitoring, an organization can be confident that they have full visibility into relevant sensitive data without requiring periodic searches through all of an organization’s network for hidden data repositories. This increased visibility is also valuable for ensuring that all sensitive or valuable data is properly secured.

• Lower Compliance Overhead and Costs

When organizations fail to embrace automation for regulatory compliance, this doesn’t remove their responsibility to maintain and demonstrate compliance. Instead, these organizations are forced to manually manage all compliance-related activities. For regulations in general and SOX in particular, compliance reports and the data that they require are fairly standardized. Paying employees to collect this data is much more expensive and time-consuming than automating data collection and just having a human check over the final numbers before sending off the report.

• Increased Productivity

The activities associated with regulatory compliance don’t earn the organization any money. The closest they come is to remove the need to pay fines for non-compliance. By freeing up human employees to perform core job roles, strategic automation of compliance activities can improve the productivity of the business and decreases the probability of human error in compliance reporting.

• Scalable Compliance

SOX is only one among many regulations that organizations must comply with. As the number of compliance regulations grows, attempting to manually maintain and demonstrate regulatory compliance quickly becomes unsustainable. Many of these new regulations are focused on sensitive data, either retaining it, as in the case of SOX, or protecting it, for GDPR and other data protection regulations. As a result, the same types of data are likely to be needed in multiple different compliance reports, and automating these data collection processes can allow an organization to maintain compliance with a growing number of new regulations and standards without needing significant growth in employee headcount.

Getting Started Automating Compliance

Almost half of the organizations are failing to take advantage of automation for SOX compliance. Like with many other regulations, SOX is focused on how an organization manages certain types of sensitive information. Compliance reporting requires an organization to gather a large amount of information about this data, and this process can be easily automated, providing a range of benefits to an organization.

One major way that an organization can lighten their compliance burden through automation is by adopting a solution that automatically identifies repositories of sensitive or protected data and provides centralized visibility, access monitoring, and vulnerability testing for them. With this type of solution in place, an organization can achieve the visibility needed for SOX compliance with much fewer manual processes, ensure that the data is properly protected, and lay the groundwork for compliance with other data protection regulations.

Mobile app and web developers are always ready to help new businesses grow and expand. They offer various customized services directed towards business support and development. Website development is the most popular service that you can get from web developers. Nevertheless, some business owners still practice the brick and mortar business. They seem not to understand the advantages of having a website. So, some of the advantages will be discussed.

Advantages of website development

1. To improve advertising

Having a website will help you to improve your advertising. By placing your website address on printed and/or promotional materials, you can attract more customers. Anybody that sees an e-mail address on the material will most likely search for that website. So, the more people view your website, the more your chances of converting them to your customers.

2. A website can attract direct customers

Top mobile app and web developers from top web development companies know how to optimize keywords for SEO so that your website can generate a lot of traffic from search engines. The benefit of this service is to increase your conversion rate. What this basically means is that as more people go to search engines to search for businesses that are similar to yours, if you have a website that has been optimized with researched keywords, your website will be among the search results. However, without a website, nobody will find you on the internet.

3. To improve productivity

When you have a website, most of the information that people may need will be available there. So, you have no need to start explaining about every product to every potential customer. This, in turn, gives you more time to concentrate and focus on more productive aspects of your business. Nevertheless, this does not mean that people will not make inquiries. You will always have inquiries because it is part of a business- without an effective communication process between you and your customers, your business may become shaky.

4. A website can serve as your information channel

When there is a new development, your website is the best place to go to; that is what you need to update. Let us say that you are offering a discount on any product, your customers and potential customers will get to know when they visit your website. You may also have new products that you want to advertise to your customers, your website is equally the best place to do so.

5. You can integrate your social networking platforms to your website

If you are already advertising your products on social media platforms, that’s a good development. However, you can achieve a much better result when a web and mobile app developer helps with social media marketing techniques. More so, when you have a website, you can integrate your social media accounts to your website to provide your customers and potential customers with more options and channels to reach you. This creates some level of trust and customer satisfaction for them.

6. A website can help to expand your business

If you want to expand your business then you need to go beyond that brick and mortar store by adopting modern business models or techniques. Website development and social media marketing are two cost-effective methods of marketing. However, you may include a mobile app to aid brand building. Nonetheless, the internet has made it possible to put your business before millions of people via your website. So, you can now do business with people from other countries, which is one of the ideas of IT specialists and what they intend to achieve with communication and the management of information systems. Moreover, top IT software solutions providers are now developing bitcoin and supporting the blockchain industry, and thus can be of great help should you plan on adopting bitcoin as a means of payment.

7. It creates a strong online presence

A combination of all the marketing techniques mentioned will help to create a strong online presence. Although, adopting all may make you break the bank, so you can just design a website and support it with either e-mail marketing or social media marketing. All the same, that method alone will still make it possible to enjoy an online presence.

8. You can build an e-mail list if you have a website

If you need to prepare an e-mail list for e-mail marketing, you can make people subscribe to newsletters, this way you can automate the collection of their e-mail addresses for your e-mail list. Also, the advantage of using an e-mail marketing technique is that you can advertise your products to your target audience.

9. A website can help you to save printing costs

A website is not just your virtual billboard, it is also your online catalog. So, you do not have to spend additional money on printing brochures, shirt printing or catalogs like it used to be in the past. The internet has helped to bridge the gap between business owners and their clients or customers.

Finally, with all that was discussed, you should be able to understand the role of web and mobile app developers in business growth and expansion. Now, you can go ahead and set up that business you have in mind, but remember to hire only reputable web developers if you want your business to enjoy some business support.

Presently, a mobile phone has become a precious possession. They are not only used to make and receive calls but also to write important emails, share content on social networks, entertain us with an interactive game, read the news, etc.

This growing need to be in front of our mobile devices makes many app development companies and designers begin to pay more attention to mobile web design, adaptive design and of course, mobile applications. For this reason, in this article, we mention some essential tips that can do a lot for the user experience on mobile devices.

Consider creating an application

The first step in being able to have an online presence is to create a website. If you already have it, you must ensure that this site is optimized for mobile devices. There is a growing number of people accessing the internet from their mobile devices, even Google has begun to take this factor into account in the positioning of search results. But it is not enough to have a website optimized for mobile phones, this is only the first step to create an online presence.

Social networks are an essential part of a plan to attract more customers. In these social networks, brands share content such as promotions or special discounts, images and phrases related to the brand and other content that strengthens the link between a customer and the brand. The success of social networks is also partly because each one of them has mobile applications designed by app development companies.

The reason why many social networks have versions of their site optimized for mobile devices and a mobile application is due to the number of people who are part of their target audience. Each of these people will have different preferences, some of them will not hesitate to install the mobile application, while others may be content to occasionally access the mobile version from their smartphones.

The “active” nature of an application demands more interaction from the users. If users frequently access your site either because you offer interesting content, then they will have no problem downloading your app designed by top app development companies.

The main benefits of an app translate into greater customer loyalty, greater interaction with the brand and greater possibilities to attract customers. You can offer your customers the news, discounts and new products. You can send information continuously to your customers and if this information is of interest to them, it is easier for you to form a more personal link between your customers and your brand.

Research your target audience before starting the design

Internet marketing is the future. Perhaps, the best part of this type of marketing is that it does not cost much money unlike making an ad on television or radio. Despite the ease that the internet gives us today to carry out a marketing campaign, it may not give the result we expect. Due to the great competition that exists on the internet and people’s expectations, we must know our target audience very well.

Conducting an in-depth study of the target audience is the first step to create an effective marketing strategy. With this information, we can make a more specific and user-centered design, thus offering a different experience from the competition. In this aspect, it is important to understand the limitations we have when designing for mobile. It is important to remember that both the experience of computers and mobile devices should be equally good.

Analyze other mobile applications

Currently, there are a lot of mobile applications. In both Google Play and the App Store, there are millions of applications. With this high number of apps and app development companies, it is quite obvious that users have various options to choose from. In the end, the application that is easier to use and offers a better user experience will be successful.

Before defining the interface of your application or even if you don’t know how to start, you can start by reviewing successful mobile apps. Study why they have succeeded. This may be the first step in identifying what makes a successful application different from the rest.

Evaluate your application statistics

Evaluating and analyzing the statistics of your website or mobile application is essential to identify possible problems and adapt your marketing strategy. Thanks to free services such as Google Analytics, you can verify the number of people who visit your site and from what device they do it. However, this information is not enough, you should also identify how many times a day they enter, the estimated time of each session, the most visited pages, etc.

This information allows you to determine if the objectives you have set in principle are being met and in a certain way, it allows you to verify if your application is succeeding or not and what possible improvements can be made in the future.

So, it is not only important to verify the most remarkable data at a glance, but also other types of data that can give you clues about consumption habits, about the parts of your application that are successful, about the parts that need to be improved, on the problems that exist and based on that analysis offer a series of possible solutions.

Put yourself in the place of your users

This is great advice for top software companies and firms creating their first mobile application. You are likely to be a user of some application, so to some extent, you understand what a good application should have. Each group is different and a lot of the design decisions depend on the research you have done on your target audience. But putting yourself in the place of your users is an excellent practice to achieve a usable mobile application. That way, you avoid unnecessary advertising that obstructs the screens or the use of some function of your application.