Importance Of Security Audit

Keeping the servers, laptops and desktop PCs in your organization secure is a vital job, as a breach in security can lead to:

• Valuable data being destroyed or altered;
• Confidential data being leaked;
• Loss of customer confidence (leading to lost business);

And the inability to use computing resources (and therefore lost productivity).
The cost of a serious security breach can be very high indeed, so most organizations devote significant resources to keeping malware and malicious hackers from getting on to the corporate network and getting access to data.

Typical defenses against these threats include:

• A firewall to separate the corporate network from the Internet
• An intrusion prevention/detection system (IPS/IDS) to detect when typical hacker activities, such as port scans, occur and to take steps to prevent them from successfully penetrating the network
• Malware scanners to prevent malicious software getting on to the network hidden in e-mail, instant messaging or Web traffic
• The use of passwords to prevent unauthorized access to networks, computers, or data stored on them.

Every organization should have these defenses in place, but this leaves a very important question to be answered: How effective are these measures? It's a deceptively simple question, but it's essential that you know the answer to it. That's because if you don't it may turn out that:

• Holes in your firewall leave your network vulnerable
• Your IPS/IDS is not configured correctly and will not protect your network effectively
• The passwords used to protect your resources are not sufficiently strong to provide the protection you require
• Your IT infrastructure has other vulnerabilities you are not aware of, such as an unauthorized and insecure wireless access point, set up by an employee.