Businesses depend on data for their operations, but have you taken the time to analyse its lifecycle or review its quality? And how do you confirm the accuracy and completeness of your business operations that leverage data from multiple sources? Analysing data is very important, for it ensures your business offerings are secure, consistent, and compliant. This process is known as a data audit, which organisations tend to ignore due to its complex nature involving hours of manual labour. Are you one of them who oversees the quality of the data?

Here’s Mendix’s latest release, Advanced Audit Trail (AAT). With AAT, you can automate your data audit trails for all Mendix applications and track organisational data changes. This is crucial for businesses involved in regulated industries, where maintaining audit trails is necessary to ensure the quality and integrity of data.

This blog will compare how automating data audits is far better than manually maintaining them. The blog will also explore Mendix AAT, its capabilities, and the implementation practices that facilitate the swift adoption of this latest Mendix release.

Manual Data Audits vs. Mendix AAT: A Comparison

Audit Trail Generation

Manual Data Audit: Manually documenting data updates in a log involves logging the system frequently to ensure the latest changes are updated, which is laborious and time-consuming. Also, human error is a significant factor in this non-real-time process of data audit, which leads to inconsistencies in changes.

Mendix AAT: On the other hand, Mendix AAT automates the audit trail process by ensuring any changes or data edits in the Mendix application are updated in real-time. This helps with the immediate detection of unauthorised changes, like who made them, and leaves no space for escape or error.

Data Accuracy

Manual Data Audit: Having accurate data changes is really challenging in a manual process where human intervention is the only possibility to enter and make the required amendments. This might lead to inaccurate data entries, misinterpretations or omissions of critical information, leading to potential oversight and inconsistent data audits.

Mendix AAT: With predefined rules and criteria, the Mendix AAT automatically validates data changes, ensuring uniform audit criteria across the entire Mendix application. Thus, it improves the overall accuracy and reliability of business processes.

Customisation and Configurability

Manual Data Audit: Tailoring the audit process to suit business requirements is not possible in manual data audit processing, for it follows a standardised procedure that is neither flexible nor adaptable to changing situations.

Mendix AAT: Organisations using Mendix applications are empowered to define audit rules and criteria that suit their business operations. This allows them to tailor their audit process and reporting formats to evolving regulatory requirements and audit needs.

Data Security

Manual Data Audit: Safeguarding data from unauthorised access is crucial in a manual data auditing process, as it involves human-managed access controls to access the data and make the necessary changes whenever required. Thus, data security is challenging and at high risk in this process of auditing.

Mendix AAT: With role-based access controls and encryption mechanisms, Mendix AAT employs advanced data security techniques for Mendix applications. This way, users can store their audit trail in an immutable database that is non-editable, ensuring the integrity and security of data both at rest and in transit.

Compliance Adherence

Manual Data Audit: Ensuring data compliance with the latest regulations is challenging for organisations relying on manual data audit processes. Frequent monitoring of data changes is impractical, leading to potential compliance gaps and penalties.

Mendix AAT: For Mendix applications, Mendix AAT automates and supports compliance assurance standards like GxP and FDA 21 CFR Part 11. This makes sure that audit trails are complete and can be used in regulatory audits and inspections.

Mendix AAT - An overview

Known for its user-friendly interface, drag-and-drop components and low-code application, Mendix has been the choice for businesses requiring application modernization and development. With its latest release, Mendix AAT, organisations can audit data changes and maintain audit trail compliance for businesses operating in a regulated environment. As a comprehensive solution, Mendix AAT not only logs every data change within the Mendix application but also monitors and tracks contextual metadata like user ID, timestamp and other intricate details.

Along with this, Mendix AAT also helps with managing large scale modifications efficiently, offering an intuitive platform for users to review, manage and respond to audit logs. This empowers Mendix application users to not just safeguard their data but also provide the necessary visibility on data integrity and reliability. Let’s analyse the contributing factors in the Mendix AAT

Core Capabilities of Mendix AAT

End-to-End Tracking

This is one of the most important and necessary features in data auditing process. Organisations can keep track of not only the changes or updates made but also who, what, when, how and why the changes were made. This empowers organisations with comprehensive details about user actions and the intentions behind data change.

Who: Captures the user ID and other critical information of individuals logged in, ensuring accountability and identification.

When: Tracks the exact timestamp of changes and edits made, maintaining the chronological sequence of events.

What: Records every detail of the changes, be it deletion, insertion or update, ensuring both old and new data is available.

How: Monitors the mode of approach, such as the application function or microflow, utilised to make the necessary changes.

Why: Document session ID and IP address to gain a complete understanding of the motive behind data changes.

Resilient Data Integrity

To prevent unauthorised access and breach practices, employing a robust data integrity mechanism is crucial and essential. This is addressed by Mendix AAT in the following ways,

Immutable Records: With this feature, Mendix AAT allows organisations to manage and store audit data in an external and immutable database, where data once stored cannot be altered or deleted, preserving the integrity of the audit trail.

Data Replication: To prevent data loss due to hardware failure, the Mendix AAT helps organisations duplicate or replicate audit records across multiple data servers, preventing even a minute piece of data from being lost or deleted.

Consistency Checks: Audit data is frequently detected and verified to ensure that it aligns with the source data.

Failover Mechanisms: In order to minimise downtime and maintain uninterrupted data availability during disasters and unforeseen events, organisations utilise failover mechanisms. These mechanisms facilitate the seamless transfer of audit records to secondary backup servers, ensuring uninterrupted operations.

Advanced Configurable Auditing

Depending on industry sectors and specialisations, organisations can tune the configurations of Mendix AAT audit record maintenance and storage. This allows them to meet diverse regulatory requirements effectively and seamlessly.

Retention Policies: Organisations can define the retention duration of audit logs in months or for how long their accessibility will be required, depending on the nature of the business and environment. This way, they can get rid of data and audit logs that have not been in use for a longer period of time.

Granular Control: Safeguarding sensitive information from unauthorised users has been a challenge, and Mendix AAT addresses this through its implementation of granular and role-based access control. This way, organisations can make sure that only validated users can access or maintain the audit records.

Selective Auditing: Mendix AAT allows organisations to customise their audit preferences, empowering them to focus on critical data. Thus, it helps organisations have a scalable and efficient auditing process with optimised performance and operational efficiency.

Archiving Options: It is crucial to maintain old audit records for reference, and Mendix AAT assists organisations with its archiving options. Old audit records can be transferred to a secondary database, remaining accessible while freeing up space for new records. This ensures efficient management and prevents information loss.

Enhanced Searchability

Having a precise and targeted search to audit records is not an easy task. To ensure organisations have access to accurate records, Mendix AAT supports them with the following functionalities.

Advanced Search Criteria: With this feature, organisations can apply user names, IDs, IP addresses or time stamps to locate audit records, enhancing the accuracy of search results.

Indexed Search: Almost all audit records are indexed, meaning organisations can retrieve or locate records rapidly, even from large datasets, speeding up the search process.

Filter Options: Tracking down audit records by applying multiple filters, such as record name, time stamps, and type of action performed (delete, update, archive), helps organisations spot the accurate record on time.

User-Friendly Interface: Mendix AAT’s search interface is intuitive and even accessible to non-technical users. Users can build their search criteria by selecting options and filling in the necessary fields, which streamlines the process of finding the required audit record.

Exportable Results: The search results can be downloaded and exported to any format, like CSV or Excel. This allows professionals to access and analyse the results to perform further compliance or reporting examinations, thereby ensuring transparency and accountability in data management.

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Key Steps for Configuring and Using Mendix AAT Efficiently

To maximise Mendix AAT capabilities for your organisation, it is necessary to follow certain practices that guarantee the best possible business outcomes. Let’s analyse them in detail.

Define Clear Audit Requirements

Begin your Mendix AAT implementation by analysing your data entities and attributes within the Mendix application that support strategic decision making. This way, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of the critical data entities that need to be audited.
For instance, if your business operates in a very regulated environment like finance, banking or healthcare, strict adherence to data regulations like GDPR or HIPAA is essential. So aligning your audit requirements based on this will help navigate compliance penalties and data breaches.
Also, specifying the type of action, like update, delete or add, will help trigger alerts for professionals to track down who entered the log for which operations.
Thus, by establishing what and why needs to be audited, organisations can gain the upper hand in monitoring and tracking data changes, overall supporting data governance.`

Configure Audit Settings

As a next step, select and configure the data entities within the Mendix application. For example, in Mendix, entities refer to data objects like “customers, orders or invoices’’.
Once the necessary entity has been selected, it’s time to choose the aligning attribute for that entity. For example, if you choose a customer entity, selecting any of the following fields, like customer name, address, or phone number, helps track the selected data.
Following this, you can customise the scope of auditing, like auditing all entities or only selected attributes. Along with this, you can also mention the type of action that needs to be triggered when it is performed.
Set the retention policies based on your organization’s criteria because legal and regulatory frameworks mandate certain durations for audit logs. For instance, GDPR requires data to be retained for about five years.
Once the retention policies are defined, you can also mention the archiving period along with them. This way, once the retention period is over, the data can be automatically sent to the archive list

Implement Data Security

Protecting data and information in Mendix AAT involves enabling scrambled or encrypted usernames and passwords for audit logs. This helps prevent unauthorised users from accessing data
To safeguard data during migration and at rest, Mendix AAT assures that the data is encrypted with protocols or role-based access, like admin, auditor, or user. This prevents non-authorised users from accessing critical information and identifies who tried to break the encryption code.
This way, organisations can rest assured that their audit data, no matter what, will remain safe and secure within and outside Mendix applications.

Regularly Review and Update Audit Configurations

It is essential to perform monthly or yearly audit configuration reviews to analyse the effectiveness of audit configurations and ensure their alignment with current business regulations. These reviews can help you track their effectiveness in meeting business objectives and requirements.
You can also form a team of professionals encompassing auditors, users, and stakeholders to check the significance of the audit configurations for current business operations and make recommendations if any changes are required.
You can also add new data entities or attributes that have become important to track due to changes in business processes or regulatory updates.
These measures ensure that your audit trail is up to date and in line with evolving business requirements.

Test and Validate Configurations

Before the final implementation or deployment of Mendix AAT, it is necessary to validate and test its efficiency and performance in automating data audits.
Create test scenarios and select the necessary entities and attributes that need to be audited from the duplicate datasets, stimulating real-world instances.
Conduct a phased test approach and monitor how Mendix AAT captures the data changes, along with triggering alerts when unauthorised users try to gain access to the audit log.
Review the generated audit log report, compare the result with the latest compliance regulations, and make sure it meets the business objectives in line with the specified conditions.
Once all verification and monitoring are completed, move ahead with the deployment of audit configurations, ensuring your business requirements are met thoroughly and completely with no discrepancies or compliance gaps.

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Conclusion

In conclusion, data auditing process forms the backbone of strategic decision-making within an organisation. Ensuring high-quality data is essential before leveraging it for business decisions. Traditionally, businesses have relied on manual data audits, a process that is labor-intensive, error-prone, and time-consuming. To streamline this complex process, Mendix introduced the innovative Mendix AAT, which automates data auditing and delivers accurate and precise information for businesses. Partnering with digital transformation experts like SquareOne enhances the adoption of Mendix AAT.

As a trusted Mendix partner, SquareOne ensures swift and seamless integration of Mendix AAT, providing businesses with an efficient solution for auditing data. Ready to transform your data auditing process? Get in touch with SquareOne experts now!