Create a Team for Audit Analytics? Part 3

In the previous post, Create a Team for Audit Analytics? Part 2, I explored the pros and cons of expecting all auditors to develop a level of data and analytic proficiency.

These auditors would continue to do audit testing that involves analytics as well as testing that does not involve analytics. In addition to keeping up their business skills, they would be learning and upgrading their data analytic skills.

In the first post of this series, I reviewed some of the pluses and minuses of creating a dedicated analytics team.

However, a third option exists, which is sort of a hybrid between having dedicated analytic auditors doing all the analytic work and requiring everyone to increase and develop their data and analytic skills.

Let’s explore the hybrid method in this post, and wrap up the series with a few final thoughts.

This is the third post of a 3-part series…

Advertisement

Server Audit for the Dauntless

If you’re looking for an insightful server audit, and you’re dauntless, you might want to jump on this train.

First, why do you need to be dauntless?

Because you’re going to need to obtain your data from a number of different sources; the bigger your company, the more likely you’ll need to call on and question more than a handful of people.

Because comparing and tracking all the servers that are on one list, but not another can be a challenge.

Because it his highly LIKELY that you WILL find something and the server team will not be happy.

Top 10 Reasons NOT to Virtualize

Trend Micro’s Dave Asprey has posted 10 reasons not to virtualize.

I generally disagree with all of them (as I’ll explain later), but I think he missed the REAL #1 reason not to virtualize…

How Virtualization Changes Audits

If you haven’t determined how server virtualization changes your audit plans, you better get moving. I’m not just talking about a virtualization audit (more on that later), but the audits that you typically do every year or on a multi-year cycle.

For example, if every year you do an audit on all networks, servers, applications, and databases that host your key financial reporting or PHI systems, you’re looking at policies and procedures, configuration management, security (including patching), user access, logging, and so on. But do you first consider whether those assets run on virtualized servers?

Securing Virtual Servers

Here’s my take on the issues that I found with the following quote from SC Magazine (for more info, see Quote of the Weak (Securing Virtual Servers):

We don’t treat the virtualization servers any different than the physical servers when it comes to security. We treat them the same. Security is security.

Quote of the Weak (Securing Virtual Servers)

When I read the following in SC Magazine, my brain identified and attempted to process so many issues at once that I experienced multiple memory and neural page faults and felt physical pain:

New, Cheap ACL Training

ACL.com just launched virtual classroom training in North America. Check it out at www.acl.com/virtual_classroom (if that doesn’t work, try here, as they keep changing the URLs).

Sorry, but the virtual classroom was discontinued, according to ACL. See Nav’s comment about this.

Free training does still exist, so see my posts regarding  Free ACL Bootcamp Training and ACL Tutorials on YouTube. Also check out the most popular post on this blog, Teach Yourself ACL.

Virtual Relationships

I find it interesting that many of us spend a lot of time on in virtual relationships.

We live and share on blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and the like, learning about various subjects, getting to know others better, and building relationships (currently called friends, connections, followers, or contacts).

Many of the people we relate to over the Internet are people who are quite distant from us, who we seldom or never see, and whose gender and age are sometimes vastly different from what they represent.