Businesses often view data security audit as a stressful and intrusive process. Auditor walks around distracting everybody and meddling in regular company operations. The usefulness of conducting audits is also something up for a debate: aren’t regular risk assessment enough to form security strategy and keep your data protected? And if you’re a subject of compliance regulations regarding private data security, then you’ll be facing an official audit sooner or later anyway. Wouldn’t you be better off preparing for that, than doing an IT security audit of your own? However, in reality, self-audits are very useful, as they fulfill a set of specific goals. Self-audits allow you to:
- But how to conduct a cyber security audit?
- External vs internal audit
- How audits differ from assessments, penetration tests, and vulnerability scans
- Main categories of security audits
- Regulatory and compliance frameworks that drive security audits
- 4 Simple steps to self-audit
- 1. Define the scope of an audit
- 2. Define the threats your data faces
- 3. Calculate the risks
- 4. Define the necessary controls
- Operational audit workflow: collecting evidence and reporting results
- Emerging audit areas: cloud environments and continuous validation
- FAQ
- Conclusion
- Establish a security baseline: results of multiple self-audits over the years serve as a fantastically reliable baseline to assess your security performance
- Help enforce security regulations and practices: audits allow you to make sure that all cyber security measures put in place in your company are thoroughly enforced and followed
- Determine the real state of your security and formulate the strategy for the future: audit will show you how things really are in a much more detailed way than risk assessment ever could. It doesn’t just highlight missing stuff, but also takes into account existing processes and shows why and how they should be improved.
All and all, self-auditing is a fantastically useful tool when you need to assess your cyber security or make sure that you’re ready for a real compliance audit down the line. It is a good practice to do self-audits fairly often: ideally, multiple times a year.
But how to conduct a cyber security audit?
What is a security audit?
A security audit measures an information system’s performance against defined criteria. Your company uses it to identify vulnerabilities, validate controls, and verify compliance. The NIST CSRC definition describes an independent review and examination of system records and activities to determine whether controls are adequate and established security policies and procedures are being followed. That examination can also detect breaches in security services and identify changes needed to counter them.
Before you audit security, decide which requirements the system will be measured against. Those criteria give the review a concrete purpose: the audit needs to establish how well your company meets them, using evidence from its systems and activities. A business security audit can therefore support both compliance verification and decisions about improvements to existing controls.
There are a variety of ways to gather the necessary data, such as access management, user action monitoring, and employee tracking software, allowing you to produce centralized reports for a thorough security assessment. However, it wouldn’t be fair to say that self-audits are without their fair share of drawbacks, and we will touch on them further down as we discuss self-auditing in more detail. But first, let’s look into pros and cons of each of the two ways you can conduct self-audit:
External vs internal audit
“The biggest operational mistake organizations make during an IT security audit is treating it as an annual compliance checkbox instead of a continuous baseline for measurable risk reduction.”
Rick Delgado, SmartDataCollectiveWhen deciding to do a self-audit you can either do it internally with your own resources or contract an external auditor. And the choice between the two is not as cut and dry as one would think.
External auditors are great at what they do. They use a set of cyber security auditing software, such as vulnerability scanners and bring their own vast experience to the table in order to examine your security and find holes in it. Yet, the big drawback to them is that they are not cheap, and finding the person with the necessary qualification and experience among the sea of offers can be very hard. Also, the success of such audit will heavily depend on the quality of communication established between your company and an auditor. If an auditor cannot get the right data or getting it late, then audit can drag on, produce unreliable results or bloat in cost. All of this make external audits a luxury instead of a permanent solution. They are great to do once a year (if you have the time and money for it), or as a way to prepare your company for a real compliance audit, but doing them every quarter can be cost-prohibitive.
Internal audits, on the other hand, are easy to do, and they can be very effective as a quarterly assessment, helping you to gather data for your security baseline and check on whether the current policies are effective or not. In practice, the drawback to that is that internal auditors will often lack the experience and tools necessary to match the quality of a professional external audit. That said, this in and of itself is not something that can’t be solved by simply hiring the right people and training them for the job.
At the same time, internal audits are cost-effective and operationally efficient. It is much easier for an internal employee or department to gather all the necessary data without the arduous process of establishing effective communication and without disturbing existing workflow within the company. And while internal audits may look complicated in theory, in reality, all you need to do is to complete a series of simple steps and get the deliverables that you want. We now discuss those steps in more detail.
How audits differ from assessments, penetration tests, and vulnerability scans
An audit answers how well security requirements are met. A security assessment puts more emphasis on proactive risk identification, looking for weaknesses that your team needs to understand and address. Vulnerability assessments study an information system for potential security weaknesses; automated scans can contribute to that work, with the results reviewed by security staff. When commissioning a company security audit, specify whether you need evidence of compliance, an investigation of weaknesses, or both.
Penetration testing has a different technical objective. As Fortinet explains, penetration tests go beyond identifying vulnerabilities by actively exploiting them through simulated attacks. A penetration test can supply evidence for an audit, but its findings concern the vulnerabilities, deficiencies, and risks exposed by the testing. When organizations seek to bridge point-in-time testing with continuous monitoring, evaluating MDR providers that combine offensive security testing with 24/7 monitoring provides ongoing validation without waiting for annual testing cycles. Maintain this distinction when agreeing on the scope and deliverables with an internal team or external provider.
| Security Evaluation | Primary Objective | Core Methodology | Key Deliverables | Typical Cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Security Audit | Verify formal compliance against established security criteria (ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST) | Evidence collection, policy and log verification, stakeholder interviews | Formal Compliance Attestation and Audit Gap Report | Annual or semi-annual |
| Security Assessment | Proactively identify posture gaps and prioritize organizational risk exposure | Architectural review, threat modeling, control gap analysis | Risk Prioritization Matrix and Remediation Roadmap | Continuous or quarterly |
| Vulnerability Scan | Discover known unpatched CVEs and service misconfigurations across assets | Automated non-intrusive network, host, and web application scanning | Prioritized CVE Vulnerability Inventory with CVSS Scores | Weekly or monthly |
| Penetration Test | Simulate adversary tactics to exploit weaknesses and validate defense depth | Ethical exploitation, lateral movement, privilege escalation testing | Proof-of-Concept Exploit Report and Root-Cause Remediation Plan | Annual or after major releases |
Main categories of security audits
Security audit programs can include compliance audits, configuration reviews, vulnerability assessments, and penetration-focused reviews. These categories describe the purpose of the work, while internal and external describe who performs it. Compliance audits examine adherence to requirements. Configuration reviews look for misconfigurations and compliance gaps. Vulnerability assessments identify weaknesses, and penetration tests examine whether weaknesses can be exploited.
TuxCare’s discussion of security audits includes these categories in its coverage of Linux system reviews. For your own audit, name the review types you expect to include and connect each to the audit’s purpose. Calling every activity an audit without specifying its objective can leave the expected deliverables unclear; distinguish the compliance review from any vulnerability assessment or penetration testing included in the engagement.
Regulatory and compliance frameworks that drive security audits
A corporate security audit needs a defined set of criteria. ISO/IEC 27001 provides information security management standards, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework supplies guidelines for improving cybersecurity posture. GDPR and HIPAA are examples of regulations that can drive compliance reviews. Your team should establish which requirements apply to the audit’s scope before collecting evidence, and distinguish regulatory obligations from the standards or guidance your company chooses to use.
Compliance work also extends beyond a single examination. IBM describes compliance validation as involving continuous assessment of security posture and ongoing remediation of gaps in policy, technology, or procedures. Audit and security teams should use the applicable requirements throughout that work, so the criteria used to evaluate controls remain connected to the changes being made.
4 Simple steps to self-audit
1. Define the scope of an audit
The first thing you need to do is to establish the scope of your audit. Whether you check the general state of security in your organization or do a specific network security audit, third party security audit, or any other, you need to know what you should look at and what you should skip.
In order to do this, you need to draw a security perimeter: a boundary around all your valuable assets. This boundary should be as small as possible and include every valuable asset that you have and that requires protection. You will need to audit everything inside this boundary and wouldn’t touch anything outside it.
The best way to define security perimeter is to create a list of all valuable assets that your company has. This can be fairly tricky, because companies often omit things like purely internal documentation, detailing, for example, various corporate policies and procedures, because it appears to have no value for the potential perpetrator. That said, such information is valuable for the company itself, because in case those documents are ever lost or destroyed (for example, because of hardware failure or employee mistake), it will take some time and money to recreate them. When cataloging assets, reviewing cybersecurity essentials for customer-facing platforms ensures that public web portals, API gateways, and client endpoints are mapped into the audit perimeter alongside internal systems. Therefore, they should also be included in your master list of all assets requiring protecting.
2. Define the threats your data faces
Once you define your security perimeter, you need to create a list of threats your data faces. The hardest part is to strike a right balance between how remote a threat is and how much impact it would have on your bottom line if it ever happens. For example, if a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, is relatively rare, but can be devastating in terms of finances; it may still be included in the list.
All and all, the most common threats, that you probably should consider including, are the following:
- Natural disasters and physical breaches: as mentioned above, while this is something that happens rarely, consequences of such a threat can be devastating, therefore, you probably need to have controls in place just in case.
- Malware and hacking attacks: external hacking attacks are one of the biggest threats to data security out there and should always be considered.
- Ransomware: this type of malware garnered popularity in latest years. If you’re working in healthcare, education or finances, you probably should watch out for it.
- Denial of service attacks: the rise of IoT devices saw a dramatic rise in botnets. Denial of service attacks is now more widespread and more dangerous than ever. If your business depends on uninterrupted network service, you should definitely look into including those.
- Malicious insiders: every company faces insider risk, even though few organizations formally evaluate it. Both your own employees and third party vendors with access to your data can easily leak it or misuse it, and you wouldn’t be able to detect it. Therefore, it is best to be ready and includes it into your own threat list. But before, we would suggest you look through the comparison of threat monitoring solutions.
- Inadvertent insiders: not all insider attacks are done out of malicious intent. The employee making an honest mistake and leaking your data accidentally is something that became all too common in our connected world. Definitely a threat to consider.
- Phishing and social engineering: more often than not a hacker will try to get access to your network by targeting your employees with social engineering techniques, practically making them give up their credentials voluntarily. This is definitely something that you should be ready for.
3. Calculate the risks
Once you established the list of potential threats that your data may face, you need to assess the risk of each of those threats firing. Such risk assessment will help you put a price tag on each threat and prioritize correctly when it comes to implementing new security controls. In order to do this, you need to look at the following things:
- Your past experience: whether you have encountered a specific threat or not may impact the probability of you encountering it in the future. If your company was a target of hacking or denial of service attack, there is a good chance it will happen again.
- General cyber security landscape: look at the current trends in cyber security. What threats are becoming increasingly popular and frequent? What are new and emerging threats? What security solutions are becoming more popular?
- State of the industry: look at the experience of your direct competition, as well as threats your industry faces. For example, if you work in healthcare or education, you will more frequently face insider attacks, phishing attacks, and ransomware, while retail may face denial of service attacks and other malware more frequently.
To move beyond subjective guesswork when calculating risk, standard cybersecurity audit frameworks calculate risk exposure using a structured scoring formula:
Risk Score = Likelihood Rating (1 to 5) × Business Impact Rating (1 to 5)
| Risk Severity Level | Calculated Score | Business Impact Criteria | Mandatory Remediation Window |
|---|---|---|---|
| Critical Risk | 20 to 25 | Immediate interruption of revenue services, active data exfiltration, or severe regulatory breach | Within 24 to 48 hours |
| High Risk | 15 to 19 | Compromise of confidential records, high likelihood of lateral movement without detection | Within 7 calendar days |
| Medium Risk | 8 to 14 | Internal operational friction, partial service impairment, or secondary control deficiency | Within 30 calendar days |
| Low Risk | 1 to 7 | Minor configuration deviation with effective compensating controls already active | Next scheduled patch cycle (60 to 90 days) |
4. Define the necessary controls
Use the following operational checklist matrix to audit control effectiveness across the core defensive tiers:
| Control Domain | Core Audit Verification Checkpoints | Primary Testing Method |
|---|---|---|
| Identity & Access (IAM) | Enforce phishing-resistant MFA across all corporate accounts, revoke dormant accounts within 24 hours, enforce least-privilege RBAC. | IdP directory review and automated access permission audits |
| Network Architecture | Audit ingress and egress firewall rule bases, verify strict segmentation between corporate and production subnets, inspect VPN controls. | Firewall rule base inspection and non-intrusive port sweeps |
| Endpoint Defense | Validate EDR agent deployment across 100% of managed endpoints, audit patch latency (critical CVEs remediated within 14 days). | Centralized EDR console telemetry and patch compliance reports |
| Data Governance & Backup | Verify AES-256 encryption at rest and in transit, maintain immutable offsite backups, conduct quarterly restoration drills. | Sample recovery drills and cryptographic configuration reviews |
| Incident Response | Maintain documented IR runbooks, conduct biannual ransomware tabletop exercises, enforce 90-day minimum immutable log retention. | Tabletop simulations and SIEM log integrity verification |
Once you established the risks associated with each threat, you’re up to the final step: creating IT security audit checklist of controls that you need to implement. Examine controls that are in place and devising a way to improve them, or implement processes that are missing. When standardizing your security tooling, evaluating the best value cybersecurity platforms for enterprises helps ensure that identity management, endpoint telemetry, and SIEM logging integrate smoothly without costly redundancy. The most common security measures that you may consider, include:
- Physical server security: if you own your own servers, you should definitely secure a physical access to them. Of course, this is not a problem if you simply renting server space from a data center. At the same time, any IoT devices in use in your company should have all their default passwords changed and physical access to them thoroughly secured in order to prevent any hacking attempts.
- Regular data backup: data backup is very effective in the case of natural disaster, or malware attack that corrupts or locks you out of your data (ransomware). Make sure that all your backups are done as frequently as possible and establish a proper procedure for restoring your data.
- Firewall and anti-virus: this is cyber security 101, but you need to protect your network with correctly configured firewalls and your computers with anti-viruses.
- Anti-spam filter: correctly configured anti-spam filter can be a great boon in fighting phishing attacks and malware sent via mail. While your employees may know to not click any links in an email, it’s always better to be safe.
- Access control: there are several ways to control access and you would be better off putting all of them in place. First of all, you need to make sure that you control the level of privilege users have and that you use principle of least privilege when creating new accounts. Apart from that, two-factor authentication is a must, as it greatly increases the security of login procedure and allows you to know who exactly accessed your data and when.
- User action monitoring: software makes a video recording of everything the user does during the session, allowing you to review every incident in its proper context. Not only is this very effective when it comes to detecting insider threats, it also is a great tool for investigating any breaches and leaks, as well as a great answer to a question of how to do IT security compliance audit, as it allows you to produce the necessary data for such an audit.
- Employee security awareness: in order to protect your employees from phishing and social engineering attacks, as well as reduce the frequency of inadvertent mistakes and make sure that all security procedures are followed through, it is best to educate them on best cyber security. Teach your employees about threats that both they and your company faces, as well as measures you put in place to combat those threats. Raising employee awareness is a great way to transform them from a liability to a useful asset when it comes to cyber security.
Operational audit workflow: collecting evidence and reporting results
Put the four planning steps into practice by agreeing on the audit’s purpose, scope, schedule, and methodology. nFlo’s security audit procedures identify interviews, documentation review, and penetration testing as methods that can form part of an audit. Select methods that fit the agreed purpose, and identify the internal and external experts who will perform the work. Audit-facing security program owners should arrange access to the relevant information and stakeholders for those methods.
Evidence collection brings together information about security systems, processes, and policies. Review the relevant documentation, interview key stakeholders, and gather system configuration and log data within scope. Technical testing supplies additional evidence where it is part of the selected methodology. The resulting report should present the audit results, conclusions, and recommendations. Your company can then use that analysis to decide where security investments will deliver the greatest risk reduction.
Emerging audit areas: cloud environments and continuous validation
Cloud infrastructure belongs in the audit scope when it contains the systems and assets under review. Cloud security audits provide a comprehensive view of that infrastructure and its alignment with security standards, controls, and regulatory frameworks. If your company operates cloud-based data systems, connect the infrastructure review to the same defined audit criteria used elsewhere in the engagement. Our cloud computing coverage provides related infrastructure context.
Continuous validation extends the work of evaluating security posture and addressing identified gaps. IBM’s compliance audit guidance describes continuous assessment alongside ongoing remediation in security policy, technology, and procedures. For your team, the operational task is to keep evaluating defenses and correcting gaps as part of the compliance process. The audit’s evidence and analysis can inform those remediation decisions.
FAQ
What is an audit in security?
An audit in security is an independent review of a system’s records and activities against established security requirements. It examines whether controls are adequate and whether policies and procedures are being followed. The review uses evidence to identify security weaknesses, verify compliance, and recommend changes to controls. Your company uses the resulting analysis to guide security improvements and investment decisions.
Conclusion
The 4 simple steps mentioned above,: defining the scope of an audit, defining the threats, assessing the risks associated with each individual threat, as well as assessing existing security controls and devising the new controls and measures to be implemented,: is all you need to do in order to conduct a security audit. Your deliverables should constitute a thorough assessment of current state of your security, as well as specific recommendations on how to improve things. The data from such self-audit is used to contribute to establishing a security baseline, as well as to formulating security strategy of your company. Cyber security is a continuous process, and self-audits should be your big regular milestones on this road to protect your data.
