The first steps of a small business have little need for information security, which is limited to an iron door to the office and a single server under the manager's desk. These precautions are usually more than enough, since the information stored on that server is of little interest to competitors, and restoring it is quite easy, requiring few resources. However, the situation changes dramatically when the business begins to grow.
As the company grows, information risks increase, ranging from elementary competitor interest in obtaining information about the company to data loss due to man-made and other disasters. The ideal scenario is when information security (IS) keeps pace with the development of the information infrastructure, which is very rare. Most often, the need for IS analysis arises only after an incident resulting in a leak or loss of information. In large corporations, special departments are created that deal with IS auditing and solve found problems, but is there any point in maintaining such a department?
A more acceptable and beneficial option is an external information security audit, which in no way relates to checking the company's compliance with certain standards. This rather powerful tool is hard to overestimate, even after weighing its obvious advantages:
– independent assessment of the current situation;
– no own resources are used in the audit, therefore losses in the work process are minimal;
– no need to expand the staff to include IT security specialists;
– audits can be carried out as needed.
What are the costs? They are easily predicted and are one-time, which cannot be said about hiring permanent employees for these purposes.
What does an external IS audit provide? First, auditors identify vulnerabilities in the system's hardware and software. Second, a check is performed for the presence of software licenses. If all necessary licenses are present, the company receives a corresponding certificate, and this is a huge plus for the company's image, especially if it operates in the international arena.
In general, this type of audit involves not only identifying existing problems in the security system, but also analyzing the collected data, based on which solutions to the identified problems are proposed.
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