Steps to perform 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 Big 4 company for almost 5 years and all this time I was performing various 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 different companies across CIS region.
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 determine how our customers 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 target is to ensure that this particular client 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 final report 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 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 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 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 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 produce 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 came to your attention during the IT Audit work. You need to combine all these findings, 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 business operations 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 discussed only with local IT management in order to address the risk.