Reasons Why You Should Not Conduct Your Own IT Audit

An IT audit used to be as simple as checking boxes and making sure that you had enough software licenses. Those days are gone. This is a multi-disciplinary specialist evaluation that covers all aspects of your IT infrastructure. This includes hardware and software, business processes and users, compliance with legal and regulatory requirements, and cyberthreat resilience. This includes IT, HR, risk, legal and information security, just to name a few. To do it right, however, you must be an expert in each of these areas.

Let’s get down to the business side. This includes ensuring your business processes are optimized and your IT capabilities meet compliance requirements. All this at a reasonable cost. This alone requires an understanding of all aspects of IT equipment, including the cost of buying, training, using and replacing it. Some of these costs are variable and obscure.

Modern IT audits must ensure compliance with all legal requirements, such as financial regulations and data privacy requirements, and external standards, such as the PCI DSS (payment card industry data security standard) if you are required to process card payments. Compliance requires legal knowledge and deep understanding of your business processes.

A broad and thorough understanding of information security is essential. It’s not enough to install a firewall or anti-virus software. In fact, both can provide false comfort. Gartner estimates that 95% firewall breaches are caused by misconfiguration. Anti-virus software can detect only 5% of known viruses. Anti-virus and firewalls do not protect paper records, premises, or staff. They are designed to protect you against outside threats when more than 80 percent of your risks are within your own network.

How can you assess your computer security, if simply ticking the boxes for “firewall” or “anti-virus” is not enough? How can you deal with employee negligence, poor processes, and negligence? How about business continuity? Do you know the assets that you are protecting and how you would recover from major disasters?

All of these aspects are specialist and interrelated. This is the problem with IT audits. It is difficult for companies to afford this level of expertise in-house. Therefore, outsourcing to an expert audit company seems the best option. Information security is the most important pillar in modern IT audits. Therefore, it is crucial that you choose a company with demonstrated and certified security expertise.