1/12
March 10, 2021
Your Ultimate Guide on How to Run a Security Audit (+
Free Templates)
process.st/security-audit
Jane Courtnell
March 10, 2021
Business Operations, IT, Security
Readers, I’ll let you in on a little secret…
Between you and me, I was hacked; by my best friend no less! Thankfully, it was just an
irritating prank, but it served to teach me a lesson.
Despite my grandiose beliefs that I knew everything I needed to know about all things digital,
I hadn’t the faintest idea about how to spot a fraudulent message from a legitimate one. And
this kind of threat is one of the biggest risks businesses face today.
In 2005, 157 data breaches were reported in the U.S., with 66.9 million records exposed.
From 2005-2014 there was a 500% increase in data breach frequency.
That number almost doubled in 3 years to 1,579 reported breaches in 2017.
2/12
Although data breaches have since declined (1,506 issues were reported in 2019), IBM’s 2020
Data Breach report filed a 12% rise in data breach costs over 5 years, increasing to ~$3.92
million per incident.
The growing number of breaches and associated costs seems to be consequential of
continuously changing hacking methods and an expanding number of entry points (that
comes from digitization).
Security audits allow organizations to set up tougher walls of safety, as an adaptive defense
against data breach threats.
With this in mind, Process Street created this article as your ultimate security audit guide,
with access to our free security audit checklists and processes.
We’ll be covering:
Let’s get started!
What are security audits?
Source
A security audit is an umbrella term for the many ways organizations can test and assess
their overall information security posture.
As organizations transition to operating and storing information in a digital space, security
audits focus on the effectiveness of an organization’s cybersecurity by comprehensively
reviewing an organization’s IT infrastructure.
3/12
A thorough security audit will evaluate the security of a system’s ph