Steps to conduct risk-based IT Audit
Let\’s talk about IT Audit today. 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 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 company. However, we had performed special IT Audits and IT Security Audits for various 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 customers perform IT risk assessments at their IT environments. That is why we often look at various reports about work performed, talk to different employees from IT department – our target is to confirm 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 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 not seen 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 it would be some tools provided by Microsoft company (e.g. MS Security Base Line Analyzer). And for UNIX environment we would use another tools. 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 assessment you need to use different IT Audit Tools. This will significantly reduce the amount of manual work you need to accomplish.
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 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 issues which came to your attention during the IT Audit work. You need to combine all these findings, sort them, and decide 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 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.