How to conduct comprehensive IT Audit
Let\’s talk about IT Audit in todays world. 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 this time I was performing different types of IT Audit. Thus, I think 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 separate IT Audits and IT Security Audits for various companies across CIS region.
While performing such small IT assessments during work for financial audit, you often hear such term as IT Risk Assessment. We need to consider risks in all our work, thus it is nothing to do – but we need to assess how our customers perform IT risk assessments at their IT environments. That is why we often look at various reports about work performed, talk to different people 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 conclusion will be very important. It would be not very good, if in future this conclusion will be affected 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 vary 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 will be used for MS SQL databases. But always 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.
Thus, by doing IT Audit assessments, we need to remember about 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 findings which you have noticed 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 classify all findings as having Low, Medium or High impact. Usually we report only Medium and High findings to the management of the company. And the Low findings are discussed only with local IT management in order to address the risk.