Business process auditing on an SOA foundation

A traditional audit technique manually controls internal data and processes. However, with the increase of the informatics transactions between global organizations, auditors have to provide a rigorous audit process. Some of them, try to deal with software products in a complex environment by using service-oriented architecture (SOA) and web services (WS). These pose new challenges for management, reliability, change management, security and much more. In this paper, a comprehensive audit mechanism is proposed to provide a cross-platform solution in a heterogeneous software/hardware environment, satisfying interdepartmental and cross-organizational business demands. A prototype of the collaborative e-procurement system is developed to demonstrate how business activities can be properly audited in the SOA architecture. Some practical examples are also given to illustrate the control points designed for a successful audit process in the system.