Question

How could AIS reduce threats? What information does marketing need to perform its tasks better?

Answer 1

Threats to accounting information systems come from various sources. If not avoided, they can destroy the relevance and reliability of financial information, leading to poor decisions by management and other stakeholders.

During data collection, it is important to establish security controls that ensure that transactions and data are valid, complete, and free from material errors. Masquerading (pretending to be an authorized user), Misrepresenting and piggybacking (tapping into telecommunications lines) are examples of hacker activities that adversely impact accounting information systems (AIS).

Threats to AIS also occur at time of data processing phase. Creating illegal programs, accessing or deleting files, destroying or corrupting a program’s logic through viruses, or altering a program’s logic to cause the application to process data incorrectly all represent threats. The failure to maintain backup files or other retrieval techniques represents a potentially devastating loss of data. Threats to the information generation and reporting phase must also be considered.

Marketing team needs to have complete and accurate data of products, target audience, regions and adequate budget to support branding and create profitable sales. The objective should be both - sales which are profitable.