Shatter Silos to Identify More Risk

If you want to increase the effectiveness of your audits and find risks that haven’t been identified before, you need to shatter your silos so you can identify more risk.

Too often, audits are performed on one process, one category, or one system: Earning Commissions, Windows Servers, or Wire Transfer. Each one of those is a separate silo (one for oats, one for corn, one for rice).

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xLookup Coming to Excel Near You!

Microsoft announced that they are adding a big brother to vLookup named xLookup.

The best things about xLookup: 1) it fixes some of the limitations of vLookup, 2) it is easy to understand and use, and 3) it replaces hLookup also.

Also, vLookup and hLookup are not going anyway, so if any of your colleagues struggle to learn new things, they can continue to use them as is.

New IT Auditor (and WannaBEs) Master List

Here’s a list of all my posts to-date related to becoming or growing as an IT Auditor, all in one place for easy reference.
I’ll add other posts as they are written.

Use LinkedIn to get an IT Audit job

If you’re looking for an IT Audit job, here’s how to use LinkedIn to get noticed.

In a nutshell, you need to enhance your LinkedIn profile so that everyone knows you’re working hard at learning IT auditor skills.

If you’re already working as an IT auditor, use these suggestions to get noticed more and move ahead (or into another company with more opportunities).

New IT Auditors Should Start Here

If you’re a new IT auditor or want to become one, I’ve listed a number of my earlier posts for your consideration. If you’re an experienced auditor, here’s an overview of the profession through my eyes.

These posts will:

1. Provide basic information regarding IT audit and security and links to other sources.
2. Help you avoid some of the hidden pitfalls that control owners and auditors face.
3. Give you ideas and approaches for some common and uncommon audits.
4. Give you a few chuckles.

If you start at the top and read through each post, you’ll get a good taste of the positives and negatives of IT auditing. Since you can’t do it in one sitting, you could bookmark the list and work your way through it as you have time.

How to Audit User Access

When checking system access, make sure you look at all the different items that affect the user’s access. For example, the user might need one or more of the following:

• Application ID
• Application role or group
• Membership in an local server group, Active Directory (AD) group, or UNIX Group
• Access to the application’s share and/or folder on the server
• Database ID
• Database role, including access permissions (read/write)
• Other permission (from a home-grown application code or enterprise identify management system)