Your company depends on you and your team, as your organization’s IT leaders, to ensure that your staff and customers have access to safe, dependable, and agile IT services. Using IT infrastructure audits is an effective strategy to guarantee that your technology is always prepared to meet such expectations.
The following five measures are among the many that must be taken to abide by an audit, yet they often need to be remembered. They provide excellent opportunities to improve overall IT quality and assist in making the infrastructure audit-proof.
Apply role-based access control for all servers and network devices, enforcing operator access control requirements with a granular and flexible permissions architecture. Security and IT audit professionals should be able to recognize any illegal attempts to access the network infrastructure and notify the relevant individuals. The same access constraints could be necessary for outsourcing companies or technological service providers. Watch out for vulnerable spots where numerous operators may share administrator passwords. These often come up while protecting Unix servers and network equipment, especially older equipment that is difficult to handle by a central authentication server.
Please keep a record of all operator operations and facilities modifications with real-time auditing, particularly those that could be improper or malicious, and include the who, what, where, and when for all of them. It won’t do to require IT personnel to disclose their activities.
Show that you have an effective change management approach by being able to use a live real-time network change analysis to verify that infrastructure modifications happen as intended.
Automatically check if internal standards and external best practices are being followed. Managers must guarantee that IT staff members follow corporate policies and best practices while making major server or network device changes. IT personnel must be able to do daily checks throughout their infrastructure in place of annual manual audits to demonstrate that they are searching for configuration settings that go against security policies.
Provide historical reports that may be seen on demand by auditors, security personnel, and IT personnel to consistently show that standards and procedures have been followed. An auditor would often see the findings as more trustworthy if IT could provide these reports more quickly and with less human involvement necessary for data collection.
Organizations will be well-positioned to withstand their next audit and reassure their clients, leaders, and business associates of the infrastructure’s integrity that powers their company with a strict, well-documented method for controlling operator access and responding to audits.