Network Audit

The act of mapping and inventorying your network’s hardware and software is known as network auditing. It’s a difficult job that necessitates manually identifying network pieces. In some circumstances, network auditing technologies can help automate the process of identifying networked devices and services. Auditing should include security documents such as user accounts and groups, as well as permissions, in addition to hardware and software.

Network Audit vs Network Assessment?

What’s the difference between an audit and an assessment of a network? While network audits are used to keep track of hardware, software, and services at each location, network evaluations are used for something quite different.

Network assessments are used to check your IT infrastructure and identify any areas that need to be improved or that are causing you concern. They discuss bandwidth constraints, network security issues, and under- and over-utilized resources, among other things.

Network assessment, in particular, can assist enterprises in resolving networking issues that have been afflicting their networks, applications, or introducing additional hazards and security concerns. Specific advice on how to improve network performance, raise network security, and reduce expenses are included in assessment reports, all with the purpose of maximizing the IT infrastructure and underlying network.

When Is a Network Audit Necessary?

When is a network audit required? There are numerous reasons to consider an audit. It’s usually scheduled around major technological decisions or commercial requirements. Here are a few reasons why your company would want to do a network audit.

Incomplete and out-of-date inventories

When was the last time you and your colleagues conducted an audit? A lot can change overtime – mergers and acquisitions, new and existing application demands on the network, budget forecasting and capital expenses, and turnover within IT and especially network infrastructure.

Upgrades & Refreshes

Network administrators have a propensity to lapse into an operational state, where their primary focus is on day-to-day operations. I like to refer to this as “keeping the lights on.” Networks, on the other hand, must be upgraded and refreshed on a regular basis. This is especially true when it comes to networking upgrades. This entails conducting an audit to determine whether hardware and software should be replaced or improved.

Troubleshooting & Resolution

We’re having a big network outage, we can’t connect to the internet, or latency difficulties are affecting apps, clients, users, and partners is probably the last thing IT or a Network Administrator wants to hear. It’s required in this situation on an emergency basis.

Regulatory & Compliance Standards

Regulatory and compliance standards are a major motivation for network audits in many industries, including financial and healthcare. HIPAA, SOC1, SOC2, FedRAMP, PCI, FISMA, NIST, and other essential compliance standards are among them. It may be used by internal or external auditors to assess the compliance of the organization as a whole.

What’s Included in a Network Audit?

Several critical focus areas that should be covered in your network auditing process are listed below. Unfortunately, some of the jobs will necessitate the use of manual labour. Others, on the other hand, can be achieved with today’s powerful network auditing and analysis technologies.

Inventory Creation

Building an inventory of your current network is the ideal place to start your network audit. This provides a list of all the devices connected to your network at each location. It’s critical to account for both physical and virtual network infrastructure for each site. Identifying the services and service providers at each site is also an important element of the process. This includes taking noting the telecom carriers, ISPs, and network providers you are using at each location along with contract expiration and pricing or rates.

Identifying Obsolescence

After you’ve established a detailed inventory of your devices and services at each site, the next step is to see if any of them are old, outdated, or nearing the end of their useful lives. Hardware like as routers, switches, and firewalls fall into this category. Software, licences, versioning, and support may also be included.

Network Architecture

This is a step in the auditing process that most network architects and engineers love. This is the stage at which they get to produce their masterpiece: network diagrams. Microsoft Visio is used by certain professionals, but others prefer SolarWinds, Intermapper, Lucidchart, Edraw Max, and LANFlow.

Network diagrams are simply used to depict the numerous connections and interconnections that exist between the network’s various locations and devices. It gives the network a visual representation.

Network Security

Network security is extremely important in the auditing process. For doing network audit hire the specialist from our team and talk to our expert, feel free to connect with us for more queries.