Why an IT Infrastructure Audit Checklist Excels

IT audits are essential to ensuring your company’s technology infrastructure remains compliant and meets industry best practices. A simple checklist can make the audit process run more efficiently, ensuring no key steps are missed along the way.

Many firms must comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley for publicly traded companies or PCI DSS for those that accept credit cards. Firms should review this IT audit checklist and other resources to ensure they are meeting compliance requirements.

Network Performance
IT issues can have a detrimental effect on any business, from productivity issues to costly downtime. Conducting an IT audit is one way of mitigating these problems and keeping operations running smoothly.

Slow network performance is a serious problem. Slow connections can cause tremendous frustration to employees and customers alike, and lead to missed revenue and opportunities being missed altogether.

Performance of your network depends on many variables, including bandwidth usage and how well your network is mapped. IT professionals can utilize EUEM tools to track these metrics and optimize network performance.

Reducing security vulnerabilities is another great way to enhance network performance. Cyber threats continue to emerge, so keeping current with your updates is important for maintaining optimal network performance.

Security Protocols
Security is of utmost importance in IT infrastructures. Cyber threats and attacks occur daily and have the potential to severely hamper business operations, making proper security protocols and monitoring tools essential in protecting against these dangers.

Firms should ensure that they implement comprehensive security protocols and a process to identify and inventory their information assets, assess any negative customer impact if these assets were compromised, consider available protections and safeguards, as well as making risk-based decisions when considering remediation or addressing vulnerabilities with their resources and likelihood that a breach occurs.

XOverture offers managed IT services to assist businesses in staying secure and avoiding issues that compromise compliance. Discover more today how our IT audit checklist can safeguard your company.

IT Logs
IT issues have the ability to seriously impact every aspect of their business, from productivity issues to data loss, so regular IT audits must be conducted to ensure systems are operating effectively and safely.

IT logs offer an accurate and comprehensive accountability map for system and data access. By recording every individual who accesses sensitive data, their level of access, and the specific files accessed, IT security specialists can better track hacker activity as well as determine why confidential information ended up in the wrong hands.

Maintaining logs can be challenging, requiring constant archival, storage, review, and clean-up activities. Furthermore, they must adhere to stringent access controls in order to prevent unauthorized deletions; this is especially essential in HIPAA compliance which mandates logs be kept for certain durations.

Systems Development
An audit of systems development involves reviewing the processes employed to design new software applications and systems. This examination helps protect against potential security threats that might emerge during their creation, as well as evaluate their testing procedures to ensure they function securely and as intended.

Disruptions to IT infrastructure can cost businesses time and money. An IT audit checklist can help reduce this issue by evaluating data backups, physical security systems, etc. to provide insight into potential vulnerabilities that threaten a company.

An IT audit checklist makes it easier to examine your IT setup and assess its relationship to overall business goals. Furthermore, an audit can identify areas in which IT security may be lacking and help devise ways of strengthening these weak areas.

Compliance
An infrastructure audit provides companies with an invaluable opportunity to assess where their current systems and processes could use improvement, including equipment upgrades, software modifications or documentation updates. An infrastructure audit also ensures that robust testing procedures exist for new software/product releases reducing risks of manual errors that can be exploited by malicious attacks.

Infrastructure audits provide companies with a means of evaluating compliance with relevant laws and regulations. This is especially helpful for companies that must abide by HIPAA, SOX or PCI DSS compliance standards.