IT Audits: A Walkthrough of the Key Phases

IT teams have come a long way from being seen as buried in technical jargon and disconnected from business objectives to gaining a strategic voice in the boardroom. At the forefront of everything technology, compliance, and cybersecurity, IT is now seen as a powerful business tool influencing critical decisions. Well-executed IT audits are key strategic advisors that shape the organization’s risk and compliance strategy.

This blog explores the focus areas of IT audits and the steps to conduct a successful one.

What is an IT audit?

An IT audit is a systematic evaluation of an organization’s IT systems, infrastructure, policies, and procedures to assess their security, effectiveness, and compliance. The primary goal of the audit is to identify risks, vulnerabilities, and compliance gaps in the IT environment while ensuring that IT objectives align with overall business goals.

Who performs an IT audit?

IT audits are performed by IT auditors, who can be internal teams or external parties with professional experience in IT governance, risk, and compliance.

• Internal IT auditors are a part of the IT security team but must be independent of the audited area to minimize bias.
• External IT auditors can be professionals with certifications such as Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA), Certified Internal Auditor (CIA), or third-party firms and auditors hired for regulatory and compliance assessments.

Importance of IT audits in maintaining cybersecurity and compliance

As businesses heavily invest in technological advancements to stay ahead of the curve, IT audits become more crucial than ever to ensure that the systems and software are performing as intended. These audits help uncover vulnerabilities, threats, and system failures that can become entry points for attackers and impact the organization’s cyber security. They are a tool to remain proactive and ensure resilience.

Another key area that IT audits support is being a compliance watchdog. These audits help validate adherence to key frameworks such as SOC 2, NIST, ISO 27001, or HIPAA. Any compliance gaps are highlighted and remediated to minimize fines and penalties and maintain customer trust.
Finally, IT audits also serve as a C-suite confidant by offering insights into the overall risk profile, strategic investments that are working, and the alignment of IT with business objectives.

Types of IT audits

The term IT audits is broad and can encompass compliance audits, security audits, performance audits, business continuity audits, and various other types.

Let’s have a look at the type of IT audits:

Compliance audit

A compliance audit ensures that IT systems meet relevant regulations and frameworks, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS, and GDPR. It is mostly conducted by third parties or external auditors.

IT General Controls (ITGC) audit

The ITGC audit assesses controls across the IT environment to ensure they are well-designed and operating efficiently. The audit covers access controls, change management, backups, recovery policies, and logical and physical controls.

Security audits

While ITGC audit focuses on a broader set of controls, security audits are more focused. These audits assess firewalls, encryption, intrusion detection systems, access controls, and other security measures to identify risks and vulnerabilities.

Operational audits

Operational audits evaluate IT operations and processes to understand resource usage and workflow efficiency. The goal is to identify areas for improvement and optimize IT processes.

Performance audits

As the name suggests, performance audits evaluate how well IT systems and infrastructure perform to support business objectives. It checks for capacity optimization, cost optimization, and IT service delivery.

System Development Lifecycle (SDLC) audits

SDLC audits evaluate the processes related to software development, such as design, coding, testing, quality assurance, and deployment. They ensure that best practices in Agile, DevOps, version controls, and documentation are followed for enhanced software releases.

Business continuity audits

Business continuity audits evaluate organizations’ preparedness to recover from disruptions by testing the business continuity

plan. They ensure that the IT systems are functional, backups are working, and recovery procedures are effective.

Cloud audits

Cloud audits are IT audits that are specifically focused on the cloud environments. These audits assess cloud service provider controls, configurations, and the overall performance of cloud infrastructure.

How to perform an IT audit?

IT audits are usually performed in phases from planning to final follow-ups and are tailored as per the needs and requirements of the organization. However, a generic IT audit consists of the following steps:

Phase 1: Planning and Preliminary Review

The planning phase is about gathering all the necessary information that’ll help you kickstart the process and provide an implementation roadmap. It includes the following activities:

• Defining audit scope: Based on the audit purpose, start by determining which areas will be audited, such as compliance, data management, operations, etc. Identify the key systems involved, including networks, databases, endpoints, and cloud environments.
• Appointing an audit team: Identify key stakeholders, such as internal IT auditors, external regulatory officials, management officials, and compliance officers, who will be part of the audit team.
• Gathering preliminary data: Collect preliminary data such as IT policies and procedures, past incident reports, compliance requirements, and change management records
• Creating an audit plan: Finalize a tactical audit plan, including methodology, approach, timelines, and tools required.

Phase 2: Risk assessments

The second phase involves conducting risk assessments to identify and prioritize key IT risks based on criticality. To determine these risks, you can use pre-defined risk checklists, risk registers, or IT risk frameworks such as NIST CSF or COBIT.

Once you’ve identified threats such as unauthorized access, malware, data breaches, system failures, and non-compliance, evaluate the likelihood and impact of each risk to shortlist high-priority risks.

Map existing controls to each risk to pinpoint gaps and develop risk mitigation strategies.

Phase 3: Fieldwork and control testing

The fieldwork and control testing phase gives you a clear picture of the current state of systems and involves the following:

• Inspection and interviews: Review documentation for each control and conduct interviews with key stakeholders to identify concerns
• Control testing: Evaluate access controls, encryption mechanisms, endpoint security, and MFA
• Vulnerability scans: Use vulnerability scanning tools such as Nessus to identify weaknesses
• Penetration tests: Simulate real-world attacks to test the effectiveness of security measures
• Process testing: Evaluate procedures such as change management or incident response

Phase 4: Analyzing and reporting

This phase involves documenting your findings with evidence, such as screenshots and logs, and comparing them to the pre-defined criteria for gaps and improvement areas.
Prepare a detailed audit report with an executive summary, methodology, key risks and control gaps, and an action plan for remediation. Present it to the stakeholders and incorporate any suggestions for process enhancement.

Phase 5: Follow-up and continuous monitoring

The follow-up phase requires you to verify whether the corrective actions have been taken. However, since it’s not a one-and-done activity, it is important to establish continuous monitoring mechanisms for ongoing security and compliance.
Keep updating the IT audit plan to reflect any IT and external environment changes.

Best practices for IT audits

Here are some of the best advice and tips from auditors to ace your IT audits:

Get the auditors involved early

This one comes straight from the auditors: Early engagement is crucial. It helps ensure alignment on expectations, scope, and evidence-collection methodologies. This is especially true when using a tool or software for collecting evidence—the auditor must understand the tool’s capabilities and how it generates evidence pieces to avoid any back-and-forth questions.

Align IT audit findings with Risk and Compliance reports

Imagine the board and top executives receiving multiple reports from risk, compliance, and IT departments, each containing conflicting or overlapping insights. This leads to discrepancies in drawing meaningful conclusions and making well-informed decisions.

Aligning IT audits with risk and compliance departments ensures that findings are communicated in a consistent language and provides comprehensive visibility into the overall risk landscape

Conduct ‘what-if’ scenario audits

Solely relying on past incident reviews is not enough, especially when threats are constantly evolving and new technological advancements are making the news every day. Test for ‘what-if’ scenarios, where you simulate security incidents such as ransomware or insider attacks to assess the organization’s preparedness and overall resilience.

Keep a record of previous IT audit findings

Keeping previous IT audit records is essential for two reasons. First, it helps monitor whether past issues are recurring or weaknesses persist, and second, it demonstrates a continuous compliance history. If you show that past recommendations were successfully incorporated, future audits may require less scrutiny.

Focus on training internal auditors

Many organizations complain of skill gaps for less comprehensive audits internally. It’s crucial to develop IT-focused audit expertise and encourage teams to get hands-on technical training and certifications. CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor) and CRISC (Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control) can help teams upskill and learn industry-recognized best practices.

Compliance standards that can help you perform IT audit

It’s a good practice to adopt a framework as the reference point for an IT audit as it helps standardize processes and provides a benchmark for comparison.

The following frameworks are a common choice of IT auditors:

ISO 27001

ISO 27001 is a globally recognized standard for information security. It serves as a reference point for many organizations managing sensitive information to ensure data confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Key areas of IT audits that it can help with include risk assessments, asset management, assessing controls, and incident management.

SOC 2

SOC 2 is a top choice for service organizations dealing with customer information as it focuses on controls relating to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of data (also known as the Trust Service Criteria)

Each TSC can help with various critical areas of IT audits. For example, testing for security criteria will help evaluate network security, access controls, and incident response plans. Similarly, availability criteria testing will ensure IT system reliability and uptime, while confidentiality criteria testing will test for data protection measures.

HIPAA

HIPAA helps protect healthcare data in the US by defining security and privacy requirements for healthcare organizations and their business associates. It also helps assess IT controls for electronic protected health information (ePHI).

It can address key areas for IT audits, including risk assessments, audit logs, access controls, encryption, and breach response.

PCI DSS

The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) ensures the security of cardholder data and is relevant for merchants and businesses that store, process, and transmit cardholder data.

It can help with testing network security and vulnerability management when conducting IT audits.

NIST

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework takes a risk-based approach to cybersecurity and offers guidelines to improve security posture. Each of the core functions, Governance, Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover, can help with a flexible approach to IT audits.

For example, the Identify function can help determine critical assets and evaluate risks, while the Detect function can help assess continuous security monitoring.

COBIT

COBIT is a framework for IT governance and management that helps align IT audits with business objectives and overall risk management.

When performing IT audits, COBIT helps ensure adherence to IT policies, assesses system updates, monitors performance, and reviews disaster recovery planning for business continuity.

GDPR

GDPR is a data privacy and protection law for EU citizens that ensures that personal data is appropriately handled. Regular audits of data processing activities are required to provide security and accountability.

As for IT audits, it can help with key areas: data mapping, access controls, encryption, impact assessments, and incident response.

Simplify and Streamline IT audits with Sprinto

IT audits are often considered time-consuming and resource-intensive because of the extensive evidence collection, tracking, and team coordination involved. Moreover, as market complexities increase, stakeholders’ expectations from IT audit results are increasing, and they also expect deeper insights into business impact and emerging risks. Enter Sprinto.

The automation-powered and integration-first platform helps simplify and streamline IT audits by doing most of the heavy lifting.

• The platform ensures that security policies and procedures are constantly enforced and access controls, change management, incident response, and other key focus areas are addressed.
• Instead of periodic compliance checks, the tool continuously monitors compliance status and sends multi-channel alerts for deviations
• It automatically collects evidence and maintains audit trails to minimize audit fatigue.
• The platform helps you collaborate with external auditors on an independent dashboard to minimize the need for context sharing and any back-and-forth questions.

Check out the platform in action and kickstart your journey today.

FAQs

What are the key components of an IT audit?

The key components of an IT audit include:

• Information security
• IT Governance
• Systems and application
• IT operations
• Data management
• Compliance
• Business continuity

What are the skills required by IT auditors?

• IT auditors require technical skills, compliance and governance knowledge, and soft skills.
• Technical skills: IT security principles, knowledge of operating systems and software
• Compliance and governance knowledge: Understanding frameworks such as NIST, ISO 27001, COBIT, etc.
• Soft skills: Stakeholder collaboration, analytical thinking, and problem-solving

What are some common IT audit challenges?

Some common IT audit challenges include:

• Emerging technology and advancements
• Regulatory updates
• Finding people with the right skill set to conduct audits
• Resource and time constraints
• Misalignment between IT audits and risk and compliance

What are some IT audit courses and certifications?

You can pursue the following certifications to upskill yourself as an IT auditor:

• CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor) – ISACA
• CRISC (Certified in Risk and Information Systems Control) – ISACA
• CIA (Certified Internal Auditor) – IIA
• CISM (Certified Information Security Manager) – ISACA