WTS Announces Completion of its Ninth Consecutive Annual SAS 70 Audit

Seattle, Washington and Denver, Colorado — WTS, Inc., a leader in application hosting for JD Edwards enterprise software announced its hosted solutions have achieved third party validation under the Statement of Accounting Standards No. 70 (SAS 70). This is the company’s ninth consecutive SAS 70 audit.

Statement on Auditing Standards No. 70, Service Organizations, is an international auditing standard developed by the American Institute of Certified Public Accounts (AICPA). A SAS 70 report validates a service organization has been through an in-depth audit of their information technology control objectives and processes. These audits demonstrate that a service organization has adequate controls and safeguards in place when they host or process data belonging to their customers.

This audit is recognized by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) as an acceptable method for management at publicly-traded companies to obtain assertions about their service organization’s controls without conducting separate audits. Under Sarbanes-Oxley's Section 404, the management of publicly traded companies must take personal responsibility for the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting, including controls at companies to which they outsource IT operations.

“This auditor’s report represents WTS’s ninth consecutive year for completing our SAS 70 validation,” said Larry McFadden, Chief Security Officer at WTS. “This recurring endorsement, by an independent audit team, provides credible proof to our customers and prospects that their critical business data is secure using our hosted services.”

The SAS 70 audit covers many of the company's control objectives including those for organizational management, security, systems availability, performance monitoring, and change management. By auditing the control objectives, the independent auditors report provides reasonable assurance that WTS’s controls are suitably designed to achieve the control objectives.

“When our JD Edwards customers entrust their data and business applications to WTS, they expect our hosting services to be exceptional,” said Sam Rediess, Vice President of Customer Service at WTS. “WTS is committed to providing operational excellence, world class security, and industry leading uptime and availability to our customers. Our customers know that our security and regulatory compliance commitments for SAS 70 and HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) meets or exceeds best-practice standards.”

The requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) of 2002 make SAS 70 audit reports important to the process of reporting on effective internal controls at service organizations. This act, adopted the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) model of controls, which is the same model that SAS 70 audits have utilized since inception. SOX heightened the focus placed on understanding the controls over financial reporting and identified a Type II SAS 70 report as the only acceptable method of obtaining third-party assurance regarding the controls at a service organization.


About WTS
WTS, Inc. provides a wide range of services for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and JD Edwards World customers including Hosting, Remote Applications Management, Disaster Recovery and complementary product support. Our customers benefit from an industry-proven solution that increases efficiency, enables business and technology change, and reduces IT risk. Oracle® (NASDAQ: ORCL) holds a significant equity interest in WTS. Founded in 1997, WTS is a privately-held corporation, with headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Additional information about WTS is available at www.wts.com.