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What is the single most challenging Sarbanes-Oxley issue today?



Frank Brick
CEO
Arsenal Digital Solutions

The single most challenging Sarbanes-Oxley issue organizations face today is finding an effective way to store, secure, provide access to, and manage company information. These organizations subject to compliance laws will need to develop new policies and procedures to prevent inadvertent or willful deletion, alteration or destruction of all information relevant to corporate financial reporting, while maintaining easy access to mission critical data by authorized personnel.

Experts and analysts agree that the reporting requirements and controls imposed by Sarbanes-Oxley apply to any and all processes, procedures, applications, systems and data involved in calculating and reporting an organizations financial information. In other words, a company must have a documented set of internal rules to control how data is generated, manipulated, recorded and reported. Because financial transactions and information are heavily dependent on technology, the storage infrastructure is an integral part of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and CIOs, compliance officers and IT managers are being challenged to re-evaluate their processes and systems to ensure they maintain adequate levels of reliability, security and documentation to meet compliance.

To compound matters, in the event of a judicial process, companies and their executives will bear the burden of proof to demonstrate that records or documents have not been intentionally or unintentionally altered or destroyed. This means documenting the security, authenticity, chain-of-custody and trails of access to these records. As a precaution, companies should anticipate retaining any and all documents subject to an audit or review (including supporting documents that contain conclusions, opinions, analyses or financial data) for a period of seven years following the conclusion of the audit.

Frank Brick is chairman and CEO of Arsenal Digital Solutions, a leading Storage Management Services (SMS) provider focused on driving major revenue for hosting, telco and network service providers through value-added, on demand storage services. Since joining Arsenal, Frank has grown the company�s revenue and customer base by more than 200 percent each.

A talented and energetic leader, Frank brings to the podium a proven track record of building and managing successful technology organizations. Prior to joining Arsenal in April 2001, Frank held the position of CEO at Telxon Corporation (now Symbol Technologies, NYSE:SBL), a $450 million publicly traded company in the mobile-wireless computer systems industry. Under his leadership, the company increased sales productivity more than 30 percent two years in a row, and turned a $25 million loss into a $45 million profit over a 12-month span.

While chairman and CEO of Basicomputer, a $225 million privately held PC distributor and network integrator, Frank grew the company from $6 million in revenue in 1984 to more than $250 million in 1992. Frank has also held various management and technical positions at Matrix Information and Directory Services, Exxon Office Systems and IBM.

Mr. Brick serves on the boards of Lehr Management Corporation and Collective Communications.


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