Fall 2017 issue of Horizons

Audrey Katcher, a partner in RubinBrown’s Business Advisory Services Group, spoke at the AICPA ENGAGE conference in Las Vegas recently on the top six transformative changes in companies that are driven by technology.

Katcher, who has more than 25 years’ experience as a technology adviser, is a member of the AICPA Trust Information Integrity Task Force.

“We’re in the early stages of the fourth industrial revolution, where the transformative impact of these many new technologies is just now beginning to be felt,” she said in a telephone interview before the conference. “The mobile internet, cloud, and big data are yesterday’s technology drivers, while the “Internet of Things” is today’s key technology innovation. Next up are cognitive computing breakthroughs in augmented intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and robotics, among other technologies still incubating.”

Here are Katcher’s top six transformative changes and their respective impact:

Governance Complexities In many organizations, cybersecurity is “owned” by the IT function, which is tasked to implement, supervise, and maintain new systems and applications. Today, cybersecurity must be owned by the entity itself, because the location, accuracy, and security of a company’s data, and the resiliency of its network to withstand cyberattacks, represent a business and compliance issue of import to senior executives and board members. Cybersecurity involves more than just technology networks and systems, given the people and processes that may inadvertently make an organization susceptible to a cyberattack. Cross-collaboration across the enterprise is essential. “Finance and IT used to be occasional collaborators on IT issues, but given increasing regulatory requirements and the need for enhanced transparency (into financial data), collaboration is not optional anymore,” Katcher said. “There has to be a ‘Switzerland’ looking out for both technology enablement and the entity’s cyber-risk protection. Someone has to define the governance strategies that are in the best interests of the company.” Cyber Everything Technology is embedded deeply across every company today, producing a fast-changing array of cybersecurity risks. “Cyber is in everything,” said Katcher. “Although technology itself is becoming more secure, the weakest link remains people, followed by inferior processes for attack detection, system recovery, and crisis management.” Substandard cybersecurity was evident in the recent “WannaCry” ransomware attacks that affected computers across the world. Many companies and government entities reportedly had not upgraded their Microsoft software with the patches provided to help prevent/mitigate the impact. “CPAs can help ensure, via attestations for companies, that the right people, processes, and controls are in place to help prevent such incidents,” Katcher said.

Here, There, And Everywhere Data Every company has what IT professionals call their “crown jewels”—highly sensitive customer data such as credit card numbers or proprietary business information.

Fall 2017

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