A day in the life of an IT Auditor

While a career in IT auditing can be extremely lucrative, it can also be very busy. With back-to-back meetings and calls, it's definitely not an easy job. Apart from the fact that IT auditors need to have very specialized knowledge and skills, time management and interpersonal skills play a huge role too. In this blog, we find out what exactly a typical day in the life of an IT Auditor looks like.  

What exactly does an IT auditor do? 

An IT auditor's job is to analyse and examine a company's technological infrastructure and provide assurance that processes and systems work correctly and efficiently while being secure and compliant with regulations. 

Any IT issues that fall under the audit, particularly those linked to security and risk management, are also identified by an IT auditor.

A typical day of an IT Auditor

If you’re thinking of becoming an IT auditor, you might be wondering what a typical day looks like. It's indeed a hectic profession with many tasks lined up for each day that demand for you to give your best while attending to back-to-back calls. Most auditors do a combination of the following things in a typical 8-hour day:

1. Throughout the day, an auditor needs to be dressed professionally and also needs to lead by example in terms of professional values. 
   
   
2. She/he needs to be extremely meticulous during the day in all audit activities. 
   
   
3. The day of an IT Auditor is jam packed with meetings that include audit-related activities, general stakeholder risk monitoring meetings, or meetings that are working groups/ steering committees where the auditor is more like an observer and an effective challenger. 
   
   
4. In between meetings, an auditor is busy completing the minutes of the meetings, writing audit work papers and also analysing the evidence obtained as part of the audit meetings. 
   
   
5. The day starts with an audit team scrum meeting where the audit team gets together and discusses what they’ll be doing during the day and challenges if any. 
   
   
6. The lunch break is not consistent and could really fly off left or right by an hour or two considering the meetings in the diary. 
   
   

The key to having a successful day as an IT auditor is to manage your time in a way that balances the audit delivery and also general well-being. 

One important insight here is that as an auditor you need to maintain your tone - stay humble but assertive. Communicate at the level of the recipient and share exactly what the recipient needs to know. You’ll also need to develop the ability to translate technical information into business terms. These qualities are not easy to uphold throughout the day, over and over again. 

I once read a statement (see below) and to me this is how an auditor should be when it comes to communications and meetings during the day.

“Be Brief. Be Bright. Be Gone”

ISACA's Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) is the gold standard of achievement for those who wish to build a career in IT Auditing. You can check out our CISA course to know more. 

You may also be interested in our CRISC course.

         Author: Abhinav Goyal

Abhinav Goyal is a professional CISSP trainer within Cyber Management Alliance’s training pool. He is CM-Alliance’s CISSP/CISA/ISO 27001/SOX/Information Risk Management/SAP Cyber security trainer. He has an MBA (Finance), along with qualifications in Computer Engineering, CISSP, CISA, ITIL (expert), COBIT (foundations), and SAP security.

If you are interested in exploring our CISSP Training & Mentorship programme details and register for your Free CISSP session or contact us at info@cm-alliance.com.