The CIPAce™ Audit Trail Engine tracks a chronology of business record changes and administrative activity changes at transaction-level. Transaction metadata such as changes in data values, date timestamp of these changes, origin of changes, and the user who made the change.

Following are examples of the platform’s audit trail recording of system activities:

° Business record changes

  • Project management changes such as updating a project team’s membership, project metadata, project scoping, etc.
  • Financial transactions e.g., creating budget estimates, budget augmentations, funding changes
  • Contract approval status

° Administrative activities

  • Creation of users and vendors
  • Changing a user’s access permissions such as user roles, department, status, manager, etc.

How it Works…

The CIPAce™ Audit Trail Engine records transaction history upon both users successfully adding new values, revising or updating values, as well as deleting various database facts.

Our approach to the challenge of delivering robust audit trail capabilities includes:

  • Enabling a snapshot of data conditions prior to and following transactions.
  • Users, both system administrators and common end-users have access to tools that query CIPAce™ for system activity logs from their front-end Web interface.
  • CIPAce™ Dashboard & Reports Engine can generate can produce activity histories in various formats such as Excel and PDF.
  • Users have the ability to track chronological values from the inception of an instance of data e.g., project, solicitation, or contract.

The Silent Asset

CIPPlanner prides itself on delivering computing solutions that meet high expectation of trustworthiness, given the nature of what our platform manages. A key element in this is the work of our CIPAce™ Audit Trail Engine that operate in the background of system processing. It is a silent asset and critically important to the overall value the CIPAce™ Enterprise Platform brings to our customers. We invest heavily in the audit trail capabilities of CIPAce™ given its importance, particularly in our cloud-based computing space. That importance is seen in the following:

COMPLIANCE

Audit trail Today’s computing solutions, both on-premise and cloud, confront various potential inappropriate uses that compromise the availability and reliability of systems.

LITIGATION

Given the comprehensive nature of CIPAce™ solutions, the business objects (e.g., solicitations, contracts, submissions, etc.), and scale of our customers’ associated capital programs and projects, we recognize the  potential for transactions to enter into the evidentiary domain of legal actions. Audit trails offer an efficient response to civil suits that might occur between any combination of our customers and third-party users (e.g., vendors). 

TROUBLESHOOTING

Recording transaction logs also enables us to identify the source of a system failure and take the necessary steps to safeguard the platform from future occurrences.

TRANSACTION INTEGRITY

Our customers procure our solutions and rightfully expect transactions to complete as intended. Namely: with information managed effectively i.e., without breaking; timely execution; and with accuracy. Regular sampling of audit trails, along with other best practices, are essential to deploying and managing sound computing resources.

INTRUSION DETECTION

Audit trail is a key input to proactive detection of malicious activity. One of the most basic form attempts made by unknown sources, whether humans or bots, to gain unauthorized access to a user’s account.

ACTIVITY FORENSICS

Audit trails are invaluable in conducting forensics of cyber-attacks such as: phishing; denial of service (DoS); SQL (e.g., spoof logon credentials, impersonate users, etc.); etc. Robust audit trail capabilities provide tool and information to investigate, pinpoint, and remedy specific attacks as well as enhance cyber-security measures.

ACCEPTABLE USAGE

Today’s computing solutions, both on-premise and cloud, confront various potential inappropriate uses that compromise the availability and reliability of systems. These include: fraudulent activity; malicious content (e.g., viruses); identity theft; impersonation, wrongful release of personal/confidential information; etc. Audit trails promote acceptable use by associating change transactions to user IDs.

OPERATIONS ANALYSIS

Audit trails serve as a powerful resource to discover opportunities for improvements to our client’s computing processes and procedures. Transactions histories can be used for benchmarking, product development, and a host of other analytics generally and on an customer basis, where needed. 

Contact us for any questions about CIPAceAudit Trail Engine capabilities. We welcome the opportunity to hear about your need, set up a demonstration, and collaborate on a CIPAce™ implementation.