IS management has recently disabled certain referential integrity controls in the database management system (DBMS) software to provide users…

Referential integrity is a preventive control that ensures relationships between database tables remain consistent, preventing the creation of "orphan" records (e.g., an order record with a customer ID that does not exist in the customer table). By disabling this control, management has accepted the risk of such data inconsistencies occurring. The most effective compensating control is a detective control that periodically checks for and identifies these very inconsistencies. A periodic table link check serves this exact purpose by running queries to find records with invalid foreign keys, allowing for subsequent correction.

A. More frequent data backups: Backups are a corrective control for disaster recovery or major data loss; they do not detect or prevent the specific data consistency errors introduced by disabling referential integrity.

C. Concurrent access controls: These controls manage simultaneous data access and modification to prevent issues like lost updates. They do not validate the logical relationships between data in different tables.

D. Performance monitoring tools: These tools measure system responsiveness and resource utilization. They would confirm the performance gains but do nothing to mitigate the data integrity risk that was created.

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1. ISACA

CISA Review Manual

27th ed.

2019. Domain 3: Information Systems Acquisition

Development

and Implementation

Section 3.5.6 Data Migration. The manual discusses the importance of verifying data integrity after migration

which includes checking referential integrity. It states

"The IS auditor should verify that key controls

such as... referential integrity

are in place... If not

the auditor should look for compensating controls." A periodic check is a classic example of such a compensating control.

2. Elmasri

R.

& Navathe

S. B. (2017). Fundamentals of Database Systems (7th ed.). Pearson. Chapter 5

"The Relational Data Model and Relational Database Constraints

" Section 5.2.3

discusses referential integrity constraints. The text explains that if these constraints are not enforced by the Database Management System (DBMS)

applications or periodic integrity-checking utilities must be used to detect and correct violations to maintain data consistency.

3. ISACA. (2014). COBIT 5: Enabling Information. Appendix B

Detailed Guidance—Enablers

BAI08.02 Manage knowledge. This section discusses the need to "Define data quality requirements and data validation rules." When automated validation rules (like referential integrity) are disabled

periodic checks become a necessary procedure to ensure data quality meets requirements.