Managing the Audit Trail in Ginesys ERP Admin
An audit trail is a security-related sequential record or a set of records, and/or destination and source of records that provide documentary evidence of the chronology of activities that have influenced a particular operation, procedure, or event at any time. It is a record of all create, edit, and delete transactions that have been made to a database or file. In the context of IT, it is a chain of evidence in the form of hard or electronic business transactions or communications resulting from business processes, functions, or programming executions.
Purpose of Audit Trail
The ability to pursue records back to their source has numerous advantages, among other things - transparency and defense of records for compliance, record integrity, and accuracy, system protection from corruption or abuse, and security of sensitive or important information. A data log secures the records of an audit trail and audit trail reports compile these records so auditors can investigate them. These records benefit business ends as diverse as -
Regulatory compliance,
Lost transaction restoration,
Disaster recovery and
Fraud detection.
Auditing is used to answer the question "Who did what?" and possibly “Why?”. Logging, by contrast, is more focused on what's happening. There is a technical issue in that Auditing often has legal requirements. Audit log entries usually include destination and source addresses, a timestamp and user login information. A probable down-side of audit trail tracking is a huge amount of “data about data” being created.