Financial institution minimises IBM audit risk

Preparing for an IBM audit

A financial institution based in the US but operating globally, provides a global settlement infrastructure to the world’s most important financial institutions. Its mission is to be the trusted partner at the centre of the exchange market.

With trillions of dollars flowing through its systems every day, the company minimises systemic risks while improving funding and operational efficiency for making FX safer, smoother and more cost effective for its members.

As a long-standing IBM customer and a significant user of IBM blockchain and hyperledger technology, it was imperative that the company understood its IBM usage against the terms of its licenses and that any risks and opportunities to optimise were addressed prior to undergoing an audit with Deloitte, IBM’s audit partner.

SoftwareOne is an IBM Platinum & Red Hat Advanced Partner and has significant experience with license compliance and audit defense, as well as working with clients who are maturing in their use of IBM technologies, and have strategic objectives to modernise their applications and adopt hybrid cloud.

SoftwareOne’s experts are IBM Cloud Pak & hybrid cloud certified and provides IBM Advisory Services with more than 30+ members team across the globe. The consultants supporting IBM engagements have extensive experience of delivering more than 120+ engagements which have saved over USD 157 million in the last three years.

For these reasons, the financial institution was in good hands asking SoftwareOne to help prepare them for their impending audit.

Advisory services spot the gaps

The primary objective of this engagement was to guide and support the client through its compliance audit, to ensure that any exposure to risk was minimised and that the outcome left the business in a favorable position with IBM to enable its longer-term objectives: to continue modernising its IBM estate and increasing its adoption of hybrid cloud.

SoftwareOne engaged with the client to agree audit and communication processes and advised on priority actions to limit any inadvertent risk exposure. This included providing guidance to employees about the audit.

SoftwareOne assisted the client throughout the audit, reviewing data collection requests from the auditors and optimising the outputs prior to these being shared, avoiding risk to the value of USD 2.3 million. At SoftwareOne’s recommendation, the client removed blockchain from the scope of the audit, which resulted in an additional risk avoidance of USD 2.5 million.