Steps to conduct risk-based IT Audit
Let\’s talk about IT Audit in todays world. What have you heard 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. 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 company. However, we 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 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 IT environments. That is why we always look at various reports about work performed, talk to different people from IT department – our target 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 possible 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 missed 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 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 will be used for Oracle databases and another are required 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 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 work. 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 you have noticed during the IT Audit work. You need to combine all these issues, sort them, and decide 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 management of the company. And the Low findings are reported only to local IT management in order to address the risk.