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 always I was performing different 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, our department had performed special IT Audits and IT Security Audits for various companies worldwide.
While doing such small IT assessments during work for financial audit, 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 customers perform IT risk assessments at their systems. That is why we often look at various reports about work done, talk to different employees from IT department – our target is to ensure that this particular company has dialed with IT risk and no significant impact would arise to the company financial statements. We just need to find 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 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 various IT Audit Tools and techniques. Such tools vary 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 we would use another tools. 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 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 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. In most cases 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.