Steps to conduct comprehensive IT Audit
Let\’s talk about IT Audit today. What do you know about IT Audit now? Have you ever been involved in such audits? I have been working for a Auditing company for almost 5 years and all always 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 firm. However, we had performed separate IT Audits and IT Security Audits for various companies worldwide.
While doing such small IT assessments during work for financial team, you often face 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 determine how our customers perform IT risk assessments at their systems. That is why we often look at various reports about work performed, talk to different employees from IT department – our goal is to confirm that this particular company has dialed with IT risk and no significant impact would arise to the company financial statements. 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 affected by exploitation of some risk, which we had not seen during our work.
But in order to perform reliable IT Audit we need to use different IT Audit Tools and techniques. Such tools are different for different environments – for example for Windows environment it would be 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 are required for Oracle databases and another will be used for MS SQL databases. But in each case while performing IT Audit assessment 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 can be performed by company, or we may perform such assessment. We need also to use some IT Audit tools and technics, and develop appropriate report for our analysis. 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 came to your attention during the IT Audit work. You need to combine all these issues, sort them, and conclude on which of them will go to final report. Usually, 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. In most cases we report only Medium and High findings to the management of the company. And the Low findings are reported only to local IT management in order to address the risk.