Successful businesses in the 21st century are built on a strong, secure IT infrastructure. A comprehensive security protocol covers a wide variety of strategizing, but this article focuses on IT infrastructure audits. It’s a detailed review of all the vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure, conducted either by internal departments or external auditors.
Distilled down to a single point, the benefits of an IT infrastructure revolve around setting your business up for sustained success. It gives you an opportunity to make any changes you need to keep up with the rapidly evolving digital world and all the new threats that pop up online.
Who Conducts an IT Infrastructure Audit?
There are 3 major ways you can organize and conduct an IT audit at your firm.
Internal IT teams
You can create a dedicated department within your organization to conduct regular IT audits. You enjoy the benefits of having in-house experts that can guide all your security protocols and who also have a deep understanding of your business and processes. However, maintaining such a department is very expensive and only suitable for a large organization that will consistently use it.
External Auditors.
There are companies dedicated to conducting IT audits. They have a roster of experts that specialize in building security protocols for a variety of industries and will most likely have a broader knowledge base than any department you can build yourself. Additionally, external audits are more credible when it comes to assuring your clients you run a secure business. For instance, ibex KSA conducting their own security audits and patting themselves on the back would raise a few eyebrows - which is why we use external auditors.
Regulatory bodies
Depending on the industry and country you’re in, regulations vary. Government agencies often conduct audits of your security protocols to ensure regulatory compliance, and these audits are usually mandatory. Failing these audits can have consequences of varying severity, so you shouldn’t rely on them to identify vulnerabilities for you. The explosion of IT services and BPO organizations in KSA has forced governing bodies to establish new regulations. IT organizations like KSA offer regulatory compliance reviews on their own, or under the ambit of an IT infrastructure audit.
The Different Branches of IT Audits
Financial Audits
These are probably the closest to a typical audit of company practices - it reviews all the financial data and transactions you’ve conducted. This can include client credit card information, baking details, personal information, and other highly sensitive materials. A financial audit ensures all information is recorded, processed, and reported in compliance with industry standards. They also go over all internal controls like transactions, reconciliation, authorization, and segregation of duties.
Enterprise Architecture and IT Management
Change has to start from the top and trickle down - especially when it comes to security. These audits verify IT management is effectively governing security structures and facilitating an efficient IT framework. You can also ensure your resources are accurately aligned with business objectives, reducing downtime and improving efficiency.
Operational Audits
IT audits help you uplift your entire IT department. They can assess system performance, resource utilization, process automation, and any other area where there’s room for improvement. While assessing the effectiveness of IT management practices, they can help streamline workflows and optimize your resource allocation.
Compliance audits
Like we mentioned above, your industry can dictate the regulations your organization is subject to. For IT security, some of the most common regulatory bodies include HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS, and making sure you comply with their guidelines is instrumental for business continuity. Compliance audits assess your security controls, data security protocols, risk management practices, and incident response frameworks to make sure you are compliant with all relevant regulations.
Performance and Security Audits
These two are two sides of the same IT infrastructure coin. Performance audits are like a full-body medical checkup for your IT infrastructure - they make sure your organization is as effective and efficient as possible. They look at system response time, resource utilization, application performance, and any other bottlenecks that may be anchoring operations. Once they have a comprehensive idea of how your systems are running, they optimize your database queries, fine-tune network configurations, and upgrade any underperforming hardware components.
On the other hand, security audits are your online guardian angels. They assess the effectiveness of all your established security protocols, including, but not limited to, firewalls, intrusion detection systems, access controls, password hygiene, and unpatched software. They establish systems to protect sensitive data and prevent any major lapse in security.
Both security and performance audits are deeply linked to each other. A poorly performing system is a security risk in and of itself; any malfunction or system downtime makes you vulnerable to an attack. At Ibex KSA, we’re constantly striving to strike a balance between security and performance; an overly secure network could be slow, affecting business objectives and productivity.
IT General Control Audits
ITGC audits are a macro-review of IT administration policies that may be causing vulnerabilities down the chain of command. Auditors conduct an analysis of all your access controls, IT operations, duty segregation, and chance management policies.
Telecommunications, Intranets, and Extranets
There’s been a massive rise in remote employment, remote clients, and virtual communication in the past five years. Businesses must adapt their security protocols to protect their networks, servers, and client devices. You need to implement telecommunication controls, firewalls, and network controls to protect data and align networks and servers with industry best practices.
Systems development audits
Audits aren’t necessarily conducted on existing systems; you can also organize preemptive audits to make sure your development is on track. A system development audit makes sure any system in development is aligned with industry regulations and company objectives. External auditors make sure internal developers are using sound methodologies by thoroughly testing and implementing any system before launch. While it may seem like an unnecessary cost at face value, it’s much more expensive to rework an existing system.
Benefits of IT Infrastructure Audits
Security and Compliance
Above all other benefits, infrastructure audits are meant to identify security vulnerabilities within your organization. It’s the most comprehensive strategy you can implement to mitigate threats like unauthorized access, data breaches, and malware injections. More often than not, this goes hand-in-hand with industry regulations and best practices. Audits help you identify any lapse in compliance before the regulatory body slaps a heavy fine on your business and damages your reputation in the market.
Performance and stakeholder confidence
An IT infrastructure audit is a great time for you to simultaneously assess the efficacy of your IT systems. You can upgrade, replace, or maintain existing IT systems to reduce your costs in the long run and improve productivity. Not only does this improve the user experience for your customers, it also boosts employee satisfaction because they have more effective tools. These practices, coupled with an external security audit, have helped ibex KSA reassure it’s customers and inspire confidence amongst stakeholders.
Virtualization and IT infrastructure audits.
As the name suggests, a virtual IT infrastructure reduces the number of physical devices your data is on by shifting them to online servers. This has its own complex set of issues and benefits.
First and foremost, consolidating your physical servers into a smaller, more manageable collection of hosts makes it much easier to conduct an audit. However, the real benefits lie in your ability to test the development of your projects. Virtualization creates isolated, controllable environments ideal for product development. In today’s age, cutting down on the physical space you need to secure your servers cuts down on your operational costs immensely.
However, virtualization is pretty complicated and presents auditors with a unique set of challenges. The ability to create, delete, and alter virtual machines with ease is great for a business but makes it exponentially harder for auditors to track changes for compliance. Auditors have had to evolve by developing automated data collection techniques and continuously monitoring virtual spaces.
Risk Mitigation and Continuous Improvement
The entire point of conducting an audit is to prepare yourself against emerging threats in the market and reduce the risk of a security breach. Regular audits make sure you stay ahead of the curve and have enough time to mitigate any risk of compromised data, financial loss, and operation disruption. As an IT firm, there is no alternative to growth. You can’t afford to rely on outdated audits and security protocols. Malicious actors evolve constantly, and so must you.
Believing an IT infrastructure audit is an unnecessary step in business processes can be one of the costliest mistakes a business makes. They’re an essential part of ensuring you maintain the highest standard of data security, efficiency, and productivity. There’s a variety of audits designed for a variety of business processes, as discussed above, and you can choose whichever combination suits your needs.
