In this 2020 edition of our annual review of issues affecting audit committees during the year‑end audit cycle, we summarize key developments for audit committees to consider. With the changing risk landscape, the audit committee’s
role continues to grow more demanding and complex amid the pandemic and a dynamic and fluid business environment.
This report will assist audit committees as they proactively address recent and upcoming developments in financial reporting, tax, the regulatory landscape and risk management.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or the Commission) staff continues to encourage audit committees to maintain the right “tone at the top” to create an environment and culture that supports the integrity of the financial reporting process. Additionally, stakeholders are requiring businesses to provide more disclosures for a variety of reasons.

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Cloud computing is the delivery of computing services like software, digital content, servers, data storage, integrated development environment over the Internet. Cloud is a metaphor for the internet as denoted in network diagrams. Companies offering such services are called as Cloud Service Providers or CSPs. They typically charge a fee for delivering computing services based upon usage just like electricity, gas, and water.

Cloud computing is a disruptive technology that has the potential to enhance collaboration, agility, scaling and availability as well as a possibility to reduce costs through optimized and efficient computing.

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The digital transformation of the global economy has hardly been slow in the past 20 years. The first mobile phone arrived in
1989. The world wide web is 30 years old and has been broadly accessible for the past 25, while the mobile internet, just 15
years of age, is approaching full global penetration. E-commerce has rapidly expanded, and digital payments platforms leading to
a broader set of digitally-enabled financial services have seen double digit growth, especially in China.

Looking at technological enablement across sectors and regions, the gating factor with respect to growth typically is not just
the state of the technology itself, but rather the speed with which individuals, organizations, and complex systems are willing
or able to change. This resistance to change is sometimes referred to as inertia, by analogy with the physics we all learned in
high school, where to put a body with some mass in motion or to change its speed or direction requires the application of
some force.

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This report aims to demonstrate the state of full stack security based on thousands of security assessments performed globally, as delivered by the Edgescan SaaS during 2020. I am still as passionate as ever in compiling this report and delving into the underlying data, as it
gives unique insight into what’s going on from a trends and statistics perspective and indeed a snapshot of the overall state of cyber security.
The Edgescan report has become a reliable source for truly representing the global state of cyber security vulnerability management. This
is becoming more evident as our unique dataset is now also part of other annual security analysis reports, such as the OWASP Top 10 and Verizon DBIR (we are happy contributors for many years now).

This year we took a deeper look at vulnerability metrics from a known vulnerability (CVE), Malware, Ransomware and visibility standpoint (exposed services), coupling both internal and public Internet-facing systems.

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Defining and communicating your Board’s Information Risk Regime is central to your organisation’s overall cyber security strategy. The National Cyber Security Centre recommends you review this regime – together with the nine associated security areas described below, in order to protect your business against the majority of cyber attacks.

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