Streamline IT Security Audits

An IT security audit is a process aimed to ensure a high standard of IT security compliance for businesses needing to operate within certain regulations or guidelines. An IT security audit examines many parameters contributing to a secure business IT system, including access rights and user activity related to confidential files and folders. Understanding access controls is important because many compliance standards are specifically related to protecting sensitive data, whether financial, medical, or personal. 

IT security audits can be performed by independent auditors on a regular basis. An audit may be proactive, to prevent issues, or it can be reactive if a security breach has already occurred. Different aspects of your IT infrastructure may come under scrutiny when your business undergoes an IT security audit, but as noted, data access is a key area of concern. 

An IT security audit is crucial for your business because it helps protect data while ensuring compliance with external regulations.

Security audit software helps you protect your business data from misuse, especially when it comes to internal users. It helps you prevent privilege abuse by providing a strong understanding of how to configure privileged user access and how to monitor privileged access for unusual activity. When it comes to IT security, a privileged user is any user who has private access to company data, usually with access granted via password or multi-factor identification. For optimal security, many businesses maintain a multi-tiered standard for privileged access—only a few administrators may be allowed to access and modify company finances, for example. This means users with access to finances will fall within a separate security group than less privileged users. 

For external purposes, your privileged access security audit can be crucial for your business to maintain its industry accreditation. Users must maintain not just a strong privileged access protocol, but also a historical documentation of privileged access activity—so an external audit cannot just detect whether something has gone amiss but look back over records for forensic analysis of when the incident occurred and who caused it. Some industry IT security audits may require strict compliance standards—HIPAA, for example, requires a six-year security record. Passing your IT security audit is important for protecting your business from fines and lawsuits. 

Security auditing software helps automate and streamline the process of analyzing your network for access control issues. 

To prevent privilege abuse, you must deploy a software to monitor user access for unusual activity. Privileged access management addresses the final level of a security breach: what happens if a user already has access to your company passwords, either through hacking or because of a malicious employee? Your security audit software must understand and enforce your privileged access structure to flag irregularities if there’s an access event. You should also be able to easily reconfigure access when an employee leaves or is promoted to a higher access level. With regards to privileged access management, there are two main functions of security audit software:

Automate privileged access management. IT security audit software helps you maintain and analyze your permissions structure. Your IT managers can use security audit tools to gain an overview of system access rights, with interactive controls of specific user groups. Privileged access overview can allow you to quickly restructure account access as necessary.

Minimize insider threat. Automated privilege access tools can minimize insider threat by monitoring privileged user metrics, reporting access data to central IT management, and flagging suspicious accounts. Some IT audit software can even automatically shut down accounts exhibiting unusual activity based on a customized threshold.

Perhaps the most important goal of any IT security audit software is to support your IT security audit.

Even before the IT security audit occurs, your IT security audit software should monitor your privileged account activity and help you to determine whether any accounts have been engaging in suspicious activity. If you have a current and historical overview of access controls within your security auditing software, there should be fewer surprises when you run an IT security audit report. 

Running reports is the primary way automated software can support compliance. IT audit tools can document and report access data using templates compliant with industry standards, which you can customize or modify as needed. IT security audit reports should have your audit trail clearly displayed according to industry standards. With the right security controls, you should be able to run quick reports, schedule reports to run automatically, and even send reports directly to your auditor as needed. 

SolarWinds Access Rights Manager offers audit checklists to help you ensure your final audit report is compliant with a wide variety of industry standards: HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, PCI DSS, GLBA, and more. With ARM, you can easily generate, customize, and deliver the reports you need for an IT security audit. 

ARM provides all the critical components of a comprehensive access rights management tool—real-time access rights monitoring, with alerts for unusual activity and an intuitive dashboard overview of user access privileges. If you wish to rearrange user privileges due to structural changes or security concerns, you can easily modify privilege access from a central control. You can also delegate access management privileges to data owners if you don’t want employees to go through you each time access must be granted. 

In addition, ARM can consolidate your domain management services into a single access management dashboard. Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, and file server management are all available in a single pane of glass, for efficient audit management and security controls.  

Related Tools:

Security Event Manager
Patch Manager
Identity Monitor

Related Features:

Security Audit Log Software for Applications and Servers
SharePoint Audit Tool
Exchange Auditing Software
Active Directory Auditing Tool
Cybersecurity Risk Management and Assessment Tool
Automated Audit Management Software
Firewall Security Audit Tool