How to conduct risk-based IT Audit
Let\’s talk about IT Audit today. What do you know about IT Audit now? Have you ever performed 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. 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 operations of my firm. However, we had performed special IT Audits and IT Security Audits for various companies across CIS region.
While doing such small IT audits 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 determine how our customers perform IT risk assessments at their systems. That is why we often look at different reports about work performed, talk to different people 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 business operations. We just need to address any potential risks to our work, as our conclusion 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 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 these tools will be completely different. The same is with databases – one IT Audit tools are required for Oracle databases and another will be used 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.
Thus, by doing 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 develop appropriate report for our work. 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 you have noticed 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. As a rule, this is done through classification of findings based on their criticality and impact to the financial statements of the company. You can sort all isues 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.