Charter Communications Uses the Force.com Sandbox Testing Environment to Ensure Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance

Challenge

• Charter Communications, a leading broadband communications company, needed to ensure Salesforce CRM customer and sales information was consistent with its financial system in order to be Sarbanes-Oxley compliant
• Customer records were represented differently in each system; Charter needed to establish a common account number for each customer to be used across systems
• With a complex plan to reconcile accounts, the company needed to validate procedures in a full test environment

Solution

• To reconcile Salesforce CRM with the billing system, Charter developed data-integration procedures to ensure consistency with any new customers and deals
• The company developed procedures to update historical data in Salesforce CRM, requiring sophisticated matching algorithms and impeccable attention to detail
• Charter used the Force.com sandbox to create a complete copy of its production environment on isolated hardware

Results

• Customer and sales information is now consistent with its financial system and meets Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements
• The Force.com sandbox gives Charter the ability to instantly create an exact, cloned cloud-computing environment with one click, without any downtime
• Charter uses the Force.com sandbox for all of its development, testing, training, and promoting changes to its production environment
• With the sandbox, Charter can easily integrate Salesforce CRM into its processes to meet all Sarbanes-Oxley compliance requirements going forward