When an IT security audit is approaching, you want to ensure your cybersecurity is demonstrably up to standard. IT security audits are important for proving that you’re meeting all your IT compliance standards and requirements, especially as cyber threats grow more frequent and severe, but you want to make sure you’re prepared.
With that in mind, let’s dive into security audits, why they matter, and steps you can take to make sure you’re ready for your audit.
What is an IT Security Audit?
An IT security audit is an assessment of a company’s IT infrastructure, policies, and practices. These audits are designed to ensure organizations comply with their regulatory requirements and policies, and to identify vulnerabilities that should be addressed.
IT security audits can assess how well IT systems are protected against cyberattacks and unauthorized access, making them valuable tools for evaluating and improving a company’s security posture.
The Role of IT Security Audits in Safeguarding Data
One of the biggest roles IT security audits play is identifying potential risks and ensuring sensitive information is protected. Audits help IT teams and MSPs identify vulnerabilities and cybersecurity risks, validate their security controls, and determine compliance with industry regulations.
For instance, an IT security audit for a healthcare company would determine whether it’s properly protecting electronic protected health information, has implemented necessary data safeguards, has policies in place should any breaches occur, and meets all other requirements for HIPAA compliance. This helps ensure the company meets its regulatory requirements while improving overall data security and risk management.
How IT Security Audits Differ from Compliance Audits
Perhaps you’ve already had a compliance audit, and you know your company is meeting its IT compliance obligations. Even then, IT security audits remain necessary, as they differ from compliance audits.
Compliance audits ensure adherence to regulatory requirements, such as GDPR, SOC 2, and PCI. They test to ensure the company is meeting specific guidelines within those regulatory frameworks and provide instructions to address any shortcomings.
IT security audits, on the other hand, don’t focus on specific requirements, but rather on a company’s IT security as a whole. These audits identify vulnerabilities and ways to improve security practices, making them applicable across industries.
Types of IT Security Audits
IT security audits can take various forms, depending on how they’re conducted. Common variations include internal, external, compliance-based, technical, and process audits.
Internal audits are security audits conducted by in-house security teams or Managed Service Providers (MSPs). These are often the most cost-effective types of audits and are typically run when organizations want to check their own security.
External audits are performed by independent security professionals or firms. These provide a thorough and objective assessment, often identifying vulnerabilities or blind spots that an internal audit might miss.
Compliance-based audits, as mentioned earlier, are designed to ensure that a company meets all its industry-specific standards and regulations. These are particularly important for companies that have strict IT compliance requirements, such as healthcare and financial organizations.
Technical audits focus on the cybersecurity tools and technologies a company uses, such as firewalls, encryption, and patch management. They’re the counterpart to process audits, which examine the company’s security policies and procedures, such as access provisioning and incident response, to ensure the organization and its employees are properly trained in security best practices and can properly respond to incidents.
Core Components of an IT Security Audit
While there are several types of IT security audits, they all share a few key elements. Core components of IT security audits include:
Asset inventory: One of the first steps to any audit is to identify and classify all assets, including hardware, software, cloud services, and data. Sorting and classifying these assets by sensitivity can also help set priorities.
Policy reviews: Security audits analyze security policies and technology to ensure the organization has response plans, proper security training, and effective protocols in place.
Risk assessment: Analyzing and identifying potential vulnerabilities is a core part of any security audit. This includes identifying the most pressing risks, such as unpatched security vulnerabilities and known exploits, so they can be prioritized and addressed quickly.
Vulnerability scans: Identifying vulnerabilities is an essential part of any IT security audit. This determines the risks and threats a business may face and helps IT and security teams identify the vulnerabilities they must address quickly.
Each of these elements must be properly documented so auditors can keep a clear record of all their findings. Auditors and IT teams should also collaborate with stakeholders to ensure the audit is comprehensive and covers every area of importance or concern.
9 Key Steps to Conduct a Comprehensive IT Security Audit
IT security audits don’t have to be complex or overwhelming. Following these tried and proven steps can help ensure a smooth and effective audit process:
1. Define Audit Scope and Objectives
Before conducting the audit, you should define the scope and objective. Auditing every aspect of a business’s IT environment is too much to do at once, so start by identifying and defining what you’ll audit, your objectives, how you’ll approach it, and your timeline. This will help guide the audit as you go.
2. Gather and Document IT Assets
Documentation is vital for a successful audit. This includes system configurations, security policies and procedures, asset inventories, vulnerability scans, information on past security incidents, and more.
3. Conduct Risk Assessment
Once you have your scope and information gathered, you can conduct a risk assessment. This identifies all potential vulnerabilities, but beyond that, it’s also necessary to rank threats by impact and likelihood, so that the most significant threats are addressed first.
4. Perform Security Testing
Threats are only actually threatening if they can bypass your security. Security testing helps determine how effective your security tools and protocols are, so you can identify any weaknesses that need to be fixed. This can be done with automated scanning tools as well as penetration tests that simulate actual attacks.
5. Analyze Findings and Identify Gaps
All the data you gather with your testing means little if you can’t analyze it for actionable information. This analysis helps identify gaps and vulnerabilities in your security so you’ll know what needs to be addressed or improved, especially if it’s connected to a high-risk system.
6. Develop Remediation Plan
Once you know where the gaps in your security lie, you can develop a plan to address them. This should include remediation steps, resource requirements, and timelines for each risk and vulnerability to ensure you’re covering all your bases.
7. Report Findings and Recommendations
At this point in the process, report all your findings and recommended actions to the appropriate stakeholders, including IT teams. It’s important to present the findings clearly and in a way that all stakeholders can understand, such as by categorizing vulnerabilities using metrics like CVSS scores.
8. Implement Remediation and Monitor Progress
Once you’ve identified your security risks and how to address them, it’s time to begin remediation. This typically includes installing security patches, reconfiguring systems to enhance security, and updating policies to address vulnerabilities. Be sure to monitor your progress to ensure everything stays on track and that you can address any obstacles along the way.
9. Conduct Follow-Up Audits
The best way to tell if you properly addressed all the issues from your audit is to conduct another audit. This follow-up should test the same areas as your first audit to ensure the security updates and remediations are working properly, and to identify any vulnerabilities a previous audit may have missed.
How to Ensure the Success of Your IT Security Audit: Common Pitfalls & Solutions
With all that said, there are still common pitfalls and stumbling blocks that can make IT security audits more difficult. Without proper preparation, these can impact the effectiveness and efficiency of audits, potentially causing the audit to miss vulnerabilities or costing companies valuable time.
Common obstacles include:
Incomplete documentation: Without proper documentation, audits can miss important information or even entire systems, fail to identify trends, and hit unexpected roadblocks. Maintaining complete and up-to-date information is important for ensuring an efficient audit.
Lack of resources: Audits aren’t free. IT teams need resources to conduct thorough audits; otherwise, audits will be rushed, incomplete, and error-prone.
Misaligned goals: If stakeholders aren’t aligned on the audit's scope and goals, they may miss important details or vulnerabilities. Collaborating with auditors and stakeholders to set clear goals is essential.
Missing critical assessments: Audits must be thorough assessments of assets, including hardware, software, cloud applications, and more. Ignoring any of these can leave large vulnerabilities exposed.
Ignoring third-party risks: Audits should include third-party vendors, as well as physical assets, cloud solutions, and so on. This provides a more complete and comprehensive audit, whereas ignoring third-party solutions can create large blind spots.
How Splashtop Improves IT Security Audits with Real-Time Monitoring & Asset Tracking
The best way to prepare for an audit is to ensure you have a full understanding of your IT environment, including real-time monitoring and detailed reporting. Fortunately, with solutions like Splashtop AEM, you can gain visibility, control, and reporting across all your remote devices and endpoints, making auditing easier and more efficient.
Splashtop AEM (Autonomous Endpoint Management) provides comprehensive monitoring, visibility, and control across all managed endpoints, including hardware and software inventory reporting. This provides IT teams with a full overview of your IT environment, with proactive monitoring and detailed records to help ensure security, accountability, and compliance with industry regulations.
As a result, IT teams using Splashtop AEM can easily provide detailed records for auditing purposes. Splashtop AEM provides real-time alerts along with AI-powered CVE insights that help teams identify, prioritize, and remediate security risks quickly. Splashtop AEM also delivers real-time patching for OS, third-party, and custom applications, ensuring systems remain compliant without the delays common in tools like Intune.
Splashtop AEM gives IT teams the tools and technology they need to monitor endpoints, proactively address issues, and reduce their workloads. This includes:
Automated patching for OS, third-party, and custom apps.
AI-powered CVE-based vulnerability insights.
Customizable policy frameworks that can be enforced throughout your network.
Hardware and software inventory data is automatically maintained for auditing purposes, helping teams produce complete asset records on demand.
Alerts and remediation to automatically resolve issues before they become problems.
Background actions to access tools like task managers and device managers without interrupting users.
Ready to experience Splashtop AEM for yourself and make IT security audits painless? Get started today with a free trial:
