Brink's Modern Internal Auditing

CHAPTER 21 Big Data and Enterprise Content Management

With our increasing emphasis on all types of automated systems and the convenient tools available to save this data as well as the low cost of data storage, industries on all levels have come to the era of what we call big data, the massive amounts of information or even just pure data captured in all types of automated systems. Enterprises, customers, and certainly government regulators often seek access to all of the data covering transactions over time and then expect this data to be available for access and analysis over prior periods.

The ability to capture and store so much data has become easier over recent years because of the relatively low cost of data storage today. However, while the costs of data storage have gone down, the amounts or volumes of data to capture and store have increased massively. With an emphasis on internal auditor knowledge needs, this chapter provides an overview of big data concepts and a discussion of governance, risk and compliance issues regarding big data, related security information, and internal audit processes for internal control reviews in a big data environment.

In addition, this chapter also will introduce enterprise content management (ECM) issues. This is again a big data–related issue where enterprises should install appropriate transactional and business controls to effectively manage the data and information contained in their key systems. Internal auditors should have a ...