A typical security audit will assess the following:

• Bring-your-own-device initiatives
• Data and access related items like cards, passwords, and tokens).
• Hardware configurations
• Information-handling processes
• The physical configuration of the system and environment
• Network
• Smart devices

The audit should evaluate each of the above against past and potential future risks, which means that your security team should be up to date on the latest security trends and the measures taken by other organisations to respond to them. At the end of the security audit, an in-depth report will put together to cover your current security arrangements' strengths and weaknesses. Whenever a vulnerability identified, the cost of securing it should get evaluated against the price of a breach.

Benefits to running security audits

• Verify that your current security strategy is adequate or not
• Check that your security training efforts are moving the needle from one audit to the next
• Reduce cost by shutting down or repurposing extraneous hardware and software that you uncover during the audit
• Uncover vulnerabilities introduced into your organisation by new technology or processes
• Prove the organisation is compliant with regulations – HIPAA, SHIELD, CCPA, GDPR, etc