Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are powerful tools for IT auditors. They save time, improve quality and bring other benefits.
Automation takes over repetitive tasks, while AI helps identify patterns and trends in data. This lets auditors work more efficiently, gain accurate insights and keep pace with technological developments. By embracing automation and AI, auditors can take their work to a higher level.
01Save time and effort
One of the most significant benefits of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) in IT auditing is that it can save both auditors and their clients an enormous amount of time and effort. IT audits are complex and time-consuming, and require auditors to work through vast amounts of data to identify potential risks and issues. IT auditors need the full cooperation and presence of their clients' system administrators, which makes the work even more labor-intensive. With automation and AI, auditors can automate many of the repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as data collection and analysis, saving valuable time and effort for themselves and for (the system administrators of) their clients.
Automation tools such as Easy2audit can automatically check systems in an organization's IT infrastructure and identify security risks and vulnerabilities. This spares auditors the time and effort of examining the infrastructure by hand, so they can focus on more critical tasks, such as analyzing the results and deciding on appropriate actions. A full manual IT audit of a Windows Server system, for example, can easily take 8 hours, for both the IT auditor and a system administrator. With a tool such as Easy2audit, the full process can be completed within minutes.
Artificial intelligence is developing fast; even over the past few months we have seen enormous progress. What AI is particularly good at is finding patterns and relationships in large amounts of data without researchers having to specify statistical models in advance. AI does, however, depend on what it has seen before: the better it is "trained", the better it will perform. Training an AI well takes a lot of data, so this is something our profession needs to work toward. In IT auditing we can build ever larger datasets that help AI calculate risks accurately and predict the likelihood of unwanted (cyber) events.
In simple terms: once an AI is well trained, you can put enormous amounts of data into a 'black box' and find relationships between variables.
02Improving the quality of IT audits
Automation and AI can also help improve the quality of IT auditors' work. By automating many of the repetitive tasks, auditors reduce the risk of human error, a common problem in manual IT audits. Automation ensures that all required data is collected and analyzed, leaving little room for human error. Moreover, AI-powered tools can analyze large amounts of data quickly and accurately, identifying risks and issues that auditors might have missed in a manual audit.
Automation and AI can also improve the consistency of audit results. Human auditors may interpret data in different ways, leading to inconsistent findings. With automation and AI, the same data is analyzed using the same algorithms, which guarantees consistency across all IT audit results.
03Other benefits
Beyond saving time and effort and improving the quality of the work, automation and AI offer IT auditors other benefits. One is that they help auditors keep up with rapidly changing technologies. With new technologies emerging all the time, staying on top of the latest developments can be a challenge for auditors. Tools that are developed specifically (and continuously) for auditing, however, keep auditors up to date with the newest technologies, identifying potential risks and issues for the latest versions of operating systems, for example.
Another benefit of automation and AI in IT auditing is that they help auditors identify patterns and trends in the data. This can be particularly useful in detecting possible fraud or other anomalies in an organization's financial data. By analyzing large amounts of data quickly, auditors can identify patterns that may point to fraud or other irregularities.
04Conclusion
Automation and AI are powerful tools that help IT auditors save time and effort, improve the quality of their work and gain other benefits. They can automate many of the repetitive and time-consuming tasks, reducing the risk of human error and improving the consistency of audit results. They also help auditors keep up with rapidly changing technologies and identify patterns and trends in the data that may point to potential risks or issues. It is therefore recommended, and even essential, for IT auditors to embrace automation and AI and integrate them into their daily work.