How to perform 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. That is way, I can say 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 company. However, our department had performed separate IT Audits and IT Security Audits for different companies worldwide.
While performing such small IT assessments during work for financial audit, you often face 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 assess how our customers perform IT risk assessments at their systems. That is why we often look at different reports about work done, talk to different people from IT department – our goal 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 find 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 impacted 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 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 will be used 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.
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 you have noticed during the IT Audit work. You need to combine all these findings, 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 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 discussed only with local IT management in order to address the risk.