Steps to perform reliable IT Audit
Let\’s talk about IT Audit today. What have you heard 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 firm. However, our department had performed special IT Audits and IT Security Audits for different 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 clients perform IT risk assessments at their systems. That is why we always 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 business operations. 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 impacted 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 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 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 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 perform.
So, while performing 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 produce appropriate report for our analysis. 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 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 financial statements 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 executives of the company. And the Low findings are reported only to local IT management in order to address the risk.