What Is a Cybersecurity Audit and Why Your Business Needs One

Every business is different, but what unites them is the fact that most of them are reliant upon the internet in one way or another. Be it storing customer details or perhaps simply processing payments, we’re all, business and individual, doing things online now.

And while technology is there to make our lives easier, it is also a window through which risks such as data breaches, phishing scams, and ransomware can make their way through. Every business needs to know where its cybersecurity level is currently, because the truth is, no matter how small or large your business is, you are a target for cybercriminals.

The way to get to know your current level of security is through a cybersecurity audit. Let’s discuss how it works and why a business should get one.

What is a Cybersecurity Audit?

To put it simply, a cybersecurity audit refers to the process of auditing the cybersecurity policies of a company. Consider it the modern-day version of finding a weakness in your castle, for ease of understanding.

It involves making sure cyber policies are strong and implemented, paired with a safety net in place. It involves checking the existence, enforcement, and strength of:

• Firewalls
• Detection services
• Compliance requirements
• Physical security controls
• User access
• Incident response

The goal is to identify weaknesses before a bad character does. With an audit, these issues are highlighted, and the readiness against industry standards and regulations like HIPAA, GDPR, or PCI-DSS is checked.

Cybersecurity Audit vs Assessment

The two, cybersecurity audit and assessment, are often considered the same. Indeed, they are both formal processes that organizations, large and small, undertake, but they’re both different, serving different purposes.

Assessments Can Be Performed Internally

A certified third party performs a cybersecurity audit for an organization. However, an assessment can be performed by the internal team.

Audits Care For Compliance, Regulations, and Standards

Assessment is ongoing, continuously identifying risks and keeping your cybersecurity posture proper. It proactively checks how well your cybersecurity policies stack up against the competition.

Auditing, on the other hand, is more tied to compliance and checks your cybersecurity standards at a specific time. It is typically performed annually or during/after a major change.

Having vs Using

An auditor is there to check certain boxes. Does your organization have a firewall? Good. Do you have backups in place? Check. Assessments are performed to check if these security measures actually work when push comes to shove.

Put simply, audits are like an exam, taken once to prove your merit. Assessment, as the name might suggest, is like an assessment, working towards making sure you pass the test on the day it is scheduled. To get a complete picture, both are important. The auditor checks if you have a car, while an assessing officer checks if the car actually runs.

Types of Cybersecurity Audits

There are two main types of cybersecurity audits, and they’re called internal and external audits.

As we touched upon previously, internal audits can be performed by your own IT department. Since they already know your internal workings, it should be easier for them to spot gaps early and prepare for the bigger and more objective external audit.

External audits are performed by a qualified third party, independent of your IT department, providing you with an objective outlook of where your cybersecurity currently stands.

The other kinds of audits are compliance and technical audits that are specific to standards like HIPAA (for healthcare), GDPR (for businesses handling EU customer data), or PCI-DSS (for payment card data), and dive into your systems, networks, and applications to look for vulnerabilities, weak configurations, or outdated software, respectively.

How Often Should You Conduct a Cybersecurity Audit?

This is one of those questions that, in order to answer accurately, a lot of factors need to be taken into consideration because there is no single right answer. However, here’s a generalized perspective on cybersecurity audit lines:

• Once a year, at least, for most businesses, is recommended.
• If a major change has occurred, like shifting from an on-prem to cloud setup, the implementation of new software, or after a merger.
• If your industry handles sensitive data, the frequency of audits must increase. Some industries that come to mind are healthcare and finance.
• If there has been a security incident, perhaps you’ve suffered a breach or an attack, an audit helps identify what went wrong and how to prevent it again.

If you recall our car metaphor from before, reel it back and think of cybersecurity audits as maintenance for your vehicle. You wouldn’t just drive your car for years without servicing it or checking up on it. Your business systems work the same way. They need regular inspections to stay safe and meet any/all compliance requirements.

Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Cybersecurity Audit

An audit is quite an intense procedure, extremely structured and requires serious planning, execution, as well as follow-ups post-op. While every business is different, most audits are performed as follows:

Step 1: Determine your goals/Planning Stage

The very first step, during the foundation stage, is determining what the agenda is for this cybersecurity audit that is being performed. Without this, the whole audit will feel chaotic and incomplete. Auditors need to clearly define:

• What is being audited? Is the goal looking at your entire digital environment or focusing on specific systems like, for example, payment systems or cloud storage? Are we looking for weaknesses generally or watching if particular standards of compliance are being met or not?
• How long is the process going to take? Who is involved? Is it being performed by an internal audit team or an external one?

With the above clear, it will be easier to perform the audit: there is a clear light to walk towards.

Step 2: Information Gathering and Defining Scope

This won’t take as long for the internal team as they’re already aware of everything needed, but for an external team, this phase, sometimes called the “discovery” step, is required in order to collect as much as possible about the organization's IT setup.

Once that is done, the scope must be defined. To put this simply, here, all the systems, processes, networks, and policies that need to be audited will be determined. Generally, the most critical assets are included here, such as patient data, for a healthcare business, for example.

They may also conduct interviews with staff members to understand how things are done day-to-day. And sometimes, what people say they do and what’s actually happening in practice can be two very different things.

Step 3: Evaluation and Testing

Now we get to business. With our scope cleared, systems are tested to see how secure they actually are, not just on paper. This step includes everything from reviewing policies and rules to conducting vulnerability scans and penetration testing to simulate real-world attacks.

Step 4: Identify threats

The findings from the previous study are now grouped into categories. After all, not every issue holds the same weight. For example, a weak password policy is risky, but if you find your database exposed? That’s an emergency. Risks are usually classified as:

• Critical: Needs urgent attention.
• High: Should be fixed as soon as possible.
• Medium: Important, but not immediately dangerous.
• Low: Worth addressing, but won’t sink the ship.

And here is a list of threats:

1. Employee devices (With WFH so common, personal devices that connect to the company network may present themselves as gateways)
2. Malware
3. DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) breaches
4. Bot attacks
5. Phishing attacks
6. Weak passwords
7. Unauthorized access
8. Inside threats (some bad characters from within the company exploiting their access)

By ranking and understanding risks, businesses can focus their energy where it matters most.

Step 5: Reporting

Needless to say, an audit would, obviously, have an official audit report. This is the stage that produces the official audit report. Depending on the provider, this document may be dense with technical jargon, or it may be written in plain, understandable words. Ideally, the best reports are the ones understandable to most working professionals.

Step 6: Remediation Support

This step may or may not occur, depending upon your contract’s fine print. However, a thorough auditor doesn’t bid you farewell after handing the report. They either implement the fixes or assist in getting them in place.

There are a number of things that might be included here, such as redesigning access control, training employees, rewriting policies, patching systems, and performing software updates.

Step 7: Follow-Up Audit

Finally, there’s the check-in. After remediation, a follow-up audit confirms that changes were made and risks reduced. The cycle doesn’t end here, though. Security is never “done.” Cybersecurity measures have to constantly improve because cybersecurity threats are always evolving, plus systems change, and employees come and go. A follow-up audit makes sure nothing risky slips back in.

Common Cybersecurity Audit Findings

Audits can be rather eye-opening, especially for SMBs that may lack any formal security programs in the first place. Plus, when presented clearly in a report, the risk is made obvious. Common cybersecurity audit findings include:

• Weak Passwords: As you might expect, passwords are still an issue today. Despite the several password managers available in the market, most individuals prefer to keep a simple “password123” style password for everything. Convenient as it may be, it is risky.
  
  
• Weak Authentication: Beyond simple passwords, many companies lack multi-factor authentication (MFA), a non-negotiable and very effective safety measure. With them, even weak passwords are given strength.
  
  
• Patch Management: A shocking number of businesses still run outdated operating systems or programs. As tech gets outdated, its weak points are made public knowledge, and without any updates on them (since they’re outdated and aren’t supported by the manufacturer anymore), they’re just a disaster waiting to happen.
  
  
• Access Control and Permissions: Employees are often given “admin” rights, which they don’t need. One misclick and things could go very wrong. This increases the insider threat we mentioned before.
  
  
• Unsecured Data: If sensitive data is stored, such as customer details, without encryption, it is equivalent to leaving a vault open for a hacker.
  
  
• Lack of Monitoring: If you can’t detect unusual activity, you may not know you’ve been breached until it’s too late.
  
  
• Incident Response Documentation: If your incident management process is incomplete and the documentation isn’t up to scratch, your team will struggle to respond quickly and effectively when a threat or breach happens.

These findings highlight one universal truth: even small oversights can lead to major consequences.

Best Practices to Get the Most From Your Audit

Audits can be expensive and time-consuming, and every organization should aim to get the most out of them and not treat them as a casual checkbox activity.

If you’re going to invest resources into cybersecurity audits, make sure the following practices are performed for a complete audit experience and, more importantly, a more secure business overall.

1. Setting Clear Audit Objectives

Walking into an audit blind will consume precious time, so the first step should be pinpointing the goal of this audit. It can be checking regular compliance, finding vulnerabilities in IT structure, or taking stock of risk management. Be upfront about these objectives to make it easier to prioritize efforts in the right direction.

2. Get Stakeholders in the Room

The sooner leadership buys in, the better. Their early involvement can make things quite easy. Executives should understand that audits aren’t about pointing fingers. Rather, they’re about protecting revenue and reputation. 

Besides, diverse input is always appreciated, and everybody being on board with the idea of the audit makes decision-making, when it’s time to gather evidence or take action on findings, easier.

3. Document Organization

Nobody likes paperwork, but business will collapse without it. So, gather all the required documentation to provide the auditors. This helps the team know what is being audited and, obviously, helps the auditors. Moreover, audit results will be documented and can be used to show regulators, customers, or investors that you’re serious about security.

4. Lean into External and Automated Help

Internal audits can be useful, but the best-of-the-best internal teams can have blind spots. A third-party auditor is objective and offers a fresh perspective.

5. Run an Internal Risk Assessment First

Audits should ideally be performed by a third-party, but a little homework goes a long way. Before the formal audit begins, your internal team can perform a risk assessment to spot obvious issues early. These self-checks allow teams to fix misconfigurations or outdated processes, so the official audit focuses on deeper issues, not easy wins.

6. Commit to Continuous Monitoring

Cyber threats won’t disappear after the auditors leave. Think of audits like fitness training. You don’t work out once and declare yourself fit. Consistent effort matters. Continuous monitoring is needed to keep an eye on network health, access patterns, and new vulnerabilities between audits.

Turning Audit Results Into Action

First off, keep in mind that if an audit finds something, don’t panic. Once the audit is done, during this phase of the process, what is to be done is determined. After all, getting the results is merely step one. What you do with them defines whether your business gets stronger or stays vulnerable.

Practical steps to turn results into real improvements:

• Prioritize What Matters First: The very first step is to sort findings by their level of risk and impact. If something is an immediate danger or is hindering the meeting of a compliance requirement, then it goes in the high-priority section. Tackling high-risk issues first helps prevent headaches down the line, especially those that could lead to data breaches or regulatory trouble. You can further divide information into categories like short-term (critical vulnerabilities), medium-term (policy updates), and long-term (training, system redesign).
  
  
• Bring in Accountability: Without someone being in charge, it is going to be very easy for remediation tasks to get lost in the mix. Give every task a clear owner who is responsible for seeing it through. Also, assign deadlines for each task so progress is on track.
  
  
• Create a Plan of Action: Big findings can overwhelm the team, so break all remediation tasks down into manageable chunks. This helps create a corrective action plan (CAP) with all steps laid out clearly. There is a deadline and ownership. That way, the project moves forward with clarity and accountability.
  
  
• Communication Counts: It is never a single-day task to fix your business IT environment, ridding it of all vulnerabilities. Things will take time. So, celebrate milestones to boost morale and reinforce commitment.
  
  
• Verify and Monitor Remediation: After you’ve made a change, test it! If the audit flagged an unpatched system, run vulnerability scans to confirm patches are installed. For new policies or procedures, check that people are following them and track compliance through regular monitoring. It’s best practice to periodically re-test and validate so you know improvements actually stick.

When businesses act on audit findings, they don’t just protect themselves. Rather, they gain a competitive edge. Customers and partners are all aware and getting increasingly worried about the security of their data. Being able to prove to them that you can be trusted with their data is a serious advantage in today’s market.

How Cortavo Makes Cybersecurity Simple for SMBs

Alt text: “Let Cortavo Handle it”.

After recognizing a major gap in how many SMBs lack the resources for dedicated IT departments, and just how disastrous something like a data breach or ransomware can be, Cortavo designed its services to provide what many are missing: a strong IT department.

Cortavo's managed IT services include:

• Cybersecurity: Implementing security measures to protect against cyber threats.
• IT Service Desk Support: Providing unlimited support for IT-related issues. From level 1.5 to 3 engineers, based in the US, to solve any issues your organization faces (fun fact: 70% of issues are resolved on the first call).
• Networking Equipment: Supplying and managing necessary hardware.
• Cloud Data Storage: Making sure secure and scalable data storage solutions.
• Hybrid Workplace Systems: Since many workforces now function on a hybrid system, our job is to secure all devices connecting to your network.

We understand how hiring an in-house IT department can be difficult and expensive, so we fill in that gap, taking care of the intricacies of IT management, wrapped up in a scalable plan that grows with your business requirements.

Contact us today to explore a plan that fits your needs and helps your business grow.

FAQs

What is a cybersecurity audit?

A cybersecurity audit refers to reviewing (auditing) a business's digital systems, policies, safety procedures, and fail-safes in order to assess if they are in place and are adequate to protect against cyber threats. It identifies vulnerabilities, measures compliance with standards, and evaluates the effectiveness of current security measures.

What is the role of a cybersecurity audit?

The main role of a cybersecurity audit is to uncover security gaps before attackers do.

What are the four types of audit?

The four main types of audits are Internal Audit (conducted by an organization’s own team), External Audit (performed by a third-party firm to provide an unbiased assessment), Compliance Audit (focuses specifically on adherence to laws, regulations, and industry standards), Operational Audit (examines business processes, efficiency, and security practices to improve overall operational effectiveness).