Everything That You Need to Know About Security Audits
Since the modern world is rife with cyberthreats, you’ll want to make sure that your organization or business is well prepared. The only way to gauge whether or not you are well-equipped to face these threats is through security audits. Now, this may be your first time encountering this term as it’s not really something that the everyday person is familiar with. To help you further your understanding of this topic, we thought it would be useful to have a short discussion on security audits. If this is something that you want to learn more about, read on as we break down everything you need to know about security audits.
What is a Security Audit?
A security audit is an in-depth investigation into your organization’s information system. During an audit, the computer security professionals check your information system against an audit checklist to measure how secure it is. Here are the parts of your organization that will be assessed:
- The physical parts of your information system and the physical location where your computer is located.
- Applications and software, including security patches that have already been installed on your systems by your network administrators.
- Network vulnerabilities, such as information passing between different parts of the internal and external networks around your organization.
- Employees’ behavior and how they handle sensitive information that is entrusted to your organization.
How Do Security Audits Work?
A security audit compares your organization’s actual security practices to industry standards and provides a list of issues that need to be remediated. Industry standards are set out by federal regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and Sarbanes-Oxley Act, as well as international organizations like the International Organization for Standardization or the National Institute for Standards in Technology. A security audit will compare your organization’s information systems to these standards and identify any issues that need to be addressed.
What Are Security Audits For?
A security audit is an evaluation of the security of an organization and determines whether it complies with the computer security standards that it has set for itself. Security audits are essential to the development of risk assessment plans and mitigation strategies for organizations that handle sensitive or confidential information.
How Do You Perform a Security Audit?
A security audit is a review of your organization’s information systems to determine whether they are secure. It may be performed internally or externally, and the timing and steps depend on the security compliance measures your organization must meet. A full security audit often involves auditors both internal or external to the organization.
You want to create an audit plan to monitor for weaknesses. Computer-assisted audit techniques (CAATs) are used to regularly check on these audits, and they regularly prepare an audit report that contains the results of their work. However, always have a trained IT professional or IT manager review these reports.
Conclusion
We hope this article proves to be useful when it comes to furthering your understanding of security audits. While this may seem like a lot of information to take in all at once, it should help give you a good foundation to make better decisions for your business. If you need a refresher on this topic, feel free to look back on this article.
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