How to perform reliable IT Audit
Let\’s talk about IT Audit today. What do you know about IT Audit now? Have you ever performed such audits? I have been working for a Big 4 company for almost 5 years and all always I was performing various types of IT Audit. Thus, I can say that I have some IT Audit experience.
A lot of of my audits were targeted to financial audits, which is the main business of my company. However, we had performed special IT Audits and IT Security Audits for different companies worldwide.
While performing such small IT audits during work for financial audit, you often face such term as IT Risk Assessment. We need to remember about risks in all our work, thus it is nothing to do – but we need to determine how our clients perform IT risk assessments at their IT environments. That is why we always look at different reports about work performed, talk to different employees from IT department – our goal is to confirm that this particular client has dialed with IT risk and no significant impact would arise to the company business operations. We just need to address any possible risks to our work, as our final report will be very important. It would be not very good, if in future this conclusion will be impacted by exploitation of some risk, which we had missed during our work.
But in order to perform reliable IT Audit we need to use various IT Audit Tools and techniques. Such tools are different for different environments – for example for Windows environment we would use some tools provided by Microsoft company (e.g. MS Security Base Line Analyzer). And for UNIX environment these tools will be completely different. The same is with databases – one IT Audit tools will be used for Oracle databases and another are required for MS SQL databases. But in each case while performing IT Audit work you need to use different IT Audit Tools. This will significantly reduce the amount of manual work you need to accomplish.
So, while performing IT Audit assessments, we need to consider the IT Risk Assessment, which may be made by company itself, or we may perform such assessment. We need also to use some IT Audit tools and technics, and produce appropriate report for our work. And only after all these tasks are finished, we can start making our IT Audit Report. This is very hard work, as you need to consider all issues which came to your attention during the IT Audit work. You need to combine all these findings, sort them, and decide on which of them will go to final report. As a rule, this is done through classification of findings based on their criticality and impact to the business operations of the company. You can sort all isues as having Low, Medium or High impact. Usually we report only Medium and High findings to the executives of the company. And the Low findings are discussed only with local IT management in order to address the risk.