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 performed such audits? I have been working for a Big 4 company for almost 5 years and all always I was performing various 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 various companies across CIS region.
While doing such small IT audits 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 confirm 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 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 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 are required for Oracle databases and another will be used for MS SQL databases. But in each case 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 remember about IT Risk Assessment, which can be performed by company, 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 decide 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 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.