Systems Audit Service

Your business is very dependent on your computer systems: servers, property management systems, Internet Access, email, etc. You should have a firewall, Backups, Anti Virus software, and additional utilities in place to safeguard your business and computer resources. But do they all work properly? Are your systems configured optimally for both functionality and performance?

Through our Systems Audit offering, we evaluate your systems, advise you of any that require attention, and present you with recommendations to resolve any deficiencies.

So how does it work?

We first evaluate the overall environment to ensure that all devices are communicating properly and efficiently, both internally and externally. We review your cabling system, switches, and router configs.

Next, we perform an initial security audit, reviewing your firewall config, VPN configs, existence of and effectiveness of your company security policy, whether it is documented or inferred. This includes password rules, group structure and membership, rights assignments, and resource access.

Then we audit your servers. We evaluate their configs and their general performance, check internal functions like DNS, WINS, DHCP, and review all logs. We then evaluate server subsystems to ensure they are in place, properly config’d, and functioning properly and optimally. These vary depending on the environment, but often include Print Servers, tape or disk Backup systems, remote (Internet) Backup systems, UPS’, and centralized Anti Virus, Anti Spyware, and Microsoft Updates (WSUS). If your environment doesn’t utilize centralized utilities for these functions, we evaluate their individual configs on your servers.

We finish by evaluating your PCs to ensure the maintenance utilities are properly config’d, running, and definitions and updates are current.

When the discovery process is completed, we meet with you to review our findings and present recommendations. A formal report is provided upon request.

We recommend a Systems Audit as a prerequisite to our Proactive Systems Management (PSM) service. The PSM service monitors numerous functions and systems, and delivers daily status reports advising if they are operating “properly”. PSM does not ensure proper configs, so without an audit it would be entirely possible to have a mis-configured system report in as healthy, while it is not providing the desired result. For instance, the Backup system will report a “Pass” condition even though the email store isn’t being backed up… if the email store was inadvertently left out of the backup config.

Many clients couple our Systems Audit service to our Systems Documentation service, as these two services have similar discovery requirements. Performing the two services concurrently reduces the time (and the cost) required to perform each service individually by about a third.