Steps to conduct risk-based 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 various types of IT Audit. That is way, I can say that I have some IT Audit experience.
Most of my audits were targeted to financial audits, which is the main business of my firm. However, we had performed special IT Audits and IT Security Audits for different companies across CIS region.
While performing such small IT assessments during work for financial team, 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 clients perform IT risk assessments at their IT environments. That is why we often look at various reports about work done, talk to different employees from IT department – our goal is to ensure 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 potential risks to our work, as our final report will be very important. It would be very bad, 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 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 are required for Oracle databases and another are required 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 perform.
So, while performing 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 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 issues which you have noticed during the IT Audit work. You need to combine all these findings, sort them, and conclude on which of them will be reported. 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 executives of the company. And the Low findings are discussed only with local IT management in order to address the risk.