Security Audit – Potential Problems
Security audits help organizations find weaknesses in their security. Security auditors do this by collecting and analyzing data about an organization's hardware, software and security policies. The audits point out vulnerabilities in the network and suggest ways to eliminate these vulnerabilities. With what they learn from the audits, organizations can improve their security and protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their digital information. For that reason, security audits are a vital part of organizational management.
However, security auditing can cause problems when not performed well. Security audits can interrupt the routine of the organization. They can become overly annoying, expensive, and disruptive. When performed poorly, the problems of security auditing can negate the benefits.
Although poorly performed security audits can cause problems, these security audits are too crucial to simply not perform.
To ensure the value of security auditing, you need to avoid any negative side-affects of your audits. You have to make sure that your security auditing disrupts day-to-day business as little as possible. You want to ensure that the audits do not get in the way of any personnel. Make sure that everyone can do their job as normal as possible. When installing and running computer auditing software, make sure that the software does not use excessive computer resources and that it does not slow down the network in any way. Additionally, you want to keep costs down, so avoid needless expenses.
Using quality software to assist and/or perform security audits can greatly help keep the audits as non-disruptive as possible. Security auditing software can often run in the background, so that users of the network may not even notice. Security auditing software can collect security data as well as organize and analyze the data.
When selecting what software to use, read customer reviews. Look for comments about the software's level of disruptiveness. Even software can disrupt business; it can hinder the ability of other essential software programs as well as the activity of personnel. Namely, you want to make sure the auditing software will not overload the network's capacity for data transfer.
Also, you need to make sure the security software is secure itself. Both security auditing software and human auditors access loads of data about the organization that they audit. They have large amounts of security clearances to perform their job. As a result, it is of grave importance to ensure that they can be trusted to keep the data secure. In analogy, you would not hire a security guard who steals. Ironically, poorly designed security auditing software may create more access points for hackers and open your network up to attacks. The best way to determine whether or not a particular software program or auditing company will open you up to attack is to check reviews of previous users of the software or previous clients of the company.
When performed correctly, security auditing will give you the needed information and advice to repair any holes in your organization's computer security. Perform these audits with care to avoid any unnecessary problems.
Source by Sam Miller
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