How to conduct reliable IT Audit
Let\’s talk about IT Audit in todays world. 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 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, our department had performed separate IT Audits and IT Security Audits for various companies worldwide.
While doing such small IT audits during work for financial team, you often hear 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 assess how our clients perform IT risk assessments at their IT environments. That is why we always look at various reports about work performed, talk to different people from IT department – our goal is to ensure that this particular company has dialed with IT risk and no significant impact would arise to the company business operations. We just need to address any potential risks to our work, as our conclusion 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 not seen during our work.
But in order to perform good and quality 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 will be used for Oracle databases and another are required for MS SQL databases. But always 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.
Thus, by doing 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 develop appropriate report for our work. And only after all these tasks are finished, we can start making our IT Audit Report. This is another very challenging task, as you need to consider all issues which you have noticed during the IT Audit work. You need to combine all these issues, sort them, and conclude on which of them will be reported. As a rule, this is done through classification of findings based on their criticality and impact to the financial statements 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.