Risks Evaluation and IT Audit Aspects of Business Intelligence Solutions

Abstract

Many organizations are struggling with a vast amount of data in order to gain valuable insights and get support in their decision-making process. Decision-making quality depends increasingly on information and the systems that deliver this information. These services are vulnerable and risky from security aspects, and they have to satisfy several requirements, like transparency, availability, accessibility, convenience, and compliance. IT environments are more and more complex and fragmented, which means additional security risks. Business intelligence solutions provide assistance in these complex business situations. Their main goal is to assist organizations to make better decisions. Better decisions means that these solutions support the management of risks, and they have a key role in raising revenue and in reducing cost. The objectives of this chapter are to give an overview of the business intelligence field and its future trends, to demonstrate the most important business intelligence solutions, meanwhile highlighting their risks, business continuity challenges, and IT audit issues. In spite of the fact that this chapter focuses on the business intelligence solutions and their specialities, risk management and the related IT audit approach can be applied for other categories of information systems. IT audit guidelines, best practices, and standards are presented as well, because they give effective tools in controlling process of business intelligence systems.