Why Is Data Governance Important for SOX-Compliant ALM?

The key aspects of a SOX-compliant data governance framework include:

1. Governance policy: As your playbook for managing, using, and changing data in compliance with SOX regulations, your governance policy creates a structured environment for data management. It outlines rules, procedures, and requirements specific to SOX.
2. Data classification: Data classification is essential to determining the sensitivity of information. In Salesforce, you’ll find several predetermined classifications, including public, internal, confidential, restricted, and mission critical. These classifications allow you to make informed decisions regarding which roles can view, change, or delete data.
3. Data protection: To prevent fraud, you need to protect sensitive financial data from unauthorized use. This involves establishing security measures, defining roles and duties, enforcing access controls, and masking or redacting test data.
4. Data monitoring: You have to monitor your data to make sure scenarios like the one above don’t occur and to measure the effectiveness of your data governance framework in terms of SOX compliance. Use data reviews to identify missing or inaccurate data. Monitor usage to track who’s interacting with financial data and what they’re doing with it. Log all the changes you make to sensitive data, including modifications to configuration data. In addition, document all those changes so you can provide a SOX auditor with a complete history in an audit report if needed. 
5. Backup and retention: Because data loss or corruption can result in SOX violations, you should always have one or more backups of your data. Moreover, make sure to retain your data according to regulations. If you destroy accounting records before the end of the required time period (which can be three or five years depending on the type of data), you can be subject to criminal penalties. This also goes for data you need to retain permanently, such as financial statements, check registers, and payroll registers. 
6. Audits: Once a year, you must hire an independent auditor to review your internal controls, policies, and procedures. When it comes to data governance for SOX, an auditor will investigate your data protection, backup, access controls, and change management process.