Benefits of an IT audit

Making IT easier to manage with an audit

An IT audit is an essential aspect of successful and efficient IT management. Auditing all of your business technology including routers, switches, firewalls servers, storage, computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones means that you have definitive snapshot of your IT estate at any one time.
However, IT auditing is often ‘overlooked’, especially in smaller and expanding businesses. Frequently, this arises from a question of resource. Often, when a business has no dedicated in-house IT support personnel, the administrative side of IT is low down the list of priorities.

Benefits of hardware auditing

At a hardware level, the audit provides a list of inventory. Recording the make, model, exact hardware specification and the date of purchase of each device, makes a wide variety of administrative tasks a lot easier, including:

• Obtaining accurate ‘book’ value for insurance purposes
• Provide police with serial numbers of missing or stolen items
• Asset management for decommissioning and disposal
• Accurate determination of depreciation for end of year financial reporting
• Planning for upgrades or replacement

Benefits of software auditing

Taking the next step and auditing the software versioning of each computer including operating systems, utilities (such as anti-virus) and patches makes it much easier to manage the IT estate in terms of productivity and performance. Benefits include:

• Identifying holes in software for providing computer and network security
• Lets you see if you have enough licenses for the installed applications
• FAST (Federation Against Software Theft) software license compliance
• Planning for upgrades or new software

IT audit advice you can trust from Paralogic

To be most effective IT auditing needs to be undertaken on a regular basis. Ideally, anytime there is a change to the infrastructure, server-side or on the user device side the change should be recorded for each device.
Spreadsheets and databases can be easily and quickly set up to record and manage audit data. There is also a multitude of auditing software solutions available that save a lot of time and require a lot less effort when compared to a manual audit process.
If you need help with any aspect of auditing IT hardware and software technology in your business, please contact us and we’ll be glad to see if we can help. Simply fill in the form on the right or call us on 01844 293 330.
Image care of Stuart Miles at freedigitalphotos.net