Certified information systems auditor (CISA) assesses information systems for areas like physical security, logging, access, and systems continuity. Responsibilities of CISA involve developing and carrying out audit plans on different computer applications and offering a guarantee for systems reliability and quality of information; analyzing information technology processes, business controls, and programs; determining internal control risks and commending their solutions; training to audit team members and drafting audit reports.
An Information Systems Auditor needs to have a bachelor \’s degree in information technology, information systems, MIS, or accounting. And ISACA CISA certification will help you fetch such a job profile. Knowledge of working with audit analysis software, SAP, Oracle, Sybase, or UNIX is an advantage.
CISA Certified Professional’s Job Roles and Responsibilities
IT auditors often have a comprehensive license and a complete command to inspect almost every feature of a network. Although they are expected to work systematically, they are given considerable freedom to plan and execute audits. They can expect to have to define their course of action, and describe their rationale for examining various systems, confining their plan to prospective vulnerabilities or highly worthwhile targets.
Once they have created a plan for auditing a system, the auditors go to work. They may oversee staff in their everyday duties, accumulate data from logs and other sources, and scan networks for known vulnerabilities. Auditors often use automated software tools to identify common configurations. These tools can include:
- Microsoft’s Baseline Security Analyzer tool
- Metasploit
- Nessus
- Custom scripts built to assess policy and permission implementations on internal networks
Auditors are expected to report their findings, conclusions, and references incoherent reports. They must be able to communicate clearly and respond to questions about their conclusions and process, frequently with high-level corporate executives. After issuing reports, auditors may sometimes proceed to work with IT departments to follow up on making changes recommended in those reports.
- Auditors are also expected to understand and assess risk. This demands that they are notified about the latest and most common developments in information security threats.
- There are many responsibilities that you should accomplish as a Security Auditor within the organization. The following list attempts to give an overview of the most usual responsibilities that you should anticipate for this job.
- You are accountable for all the security audits within the organization regarding scheduling them, implementing them, and further controlling them with your team.
- It is CISA’s role to gauge the financial and information systems within the organization, the followed security controls, and measures taken for management grounds. You should always examine these systems and propose any relevant modifications.
- You have to ensure that all the operation procedure within the organization are productive, efficient, and most significantly adaptable with security policies and corresponding government regulations.
- You should also carry out a test for IT systems in the organization. Similar tests should be an emphasis on assessing the risks connected with having them.
- It is your duty as a security consultant to review the staff and interview them to get security risks and complexity created for the organization.
- You must always file all the audit processes implemented for each computing environment in the organization and each computer application employed there, considering documenting the results, which is always a recommended feature.
- You should measure the amount of vulnerability or risk that is resulting from any control practices that are either not useful or missing.
- You should always analyze the results that you obtain from the audit process with some specified standards for the systems.
- You should always judge how much the results of the audit are significant and precise regarding the audit evidence.
- You are expected to create both a written technical report to point out all the outcomes of the audit, along with being able to orally convey these results.
- You should then always develop your recommendations based on the best methods in the field to better the present situations of the systems of the organization.
- You should always be in a persistent collaboration with all the IT departments to ensure that security compliance is strengthened, all the associated risks are controlled, and that potency is assured in the process also.
Job Profiles
It is vital to point out that you will have to travel a lot for job purposes. This may be because you could become a freelance security auditor.
Though, you can still turn out to be a security auditor working with some other members of IT security teams.
- Security Administrator
- System Administrator
- Network Administrator
After acquiring a satisfactory knowledge base in one of these professions, you should take a step further to a more specific job. Some of these job profiles are mentioned in the following list.
- Security Engineer
- Security Consultant
- Security Specialist
- Security Analyst
It is okay for a Certified Information Systems Auditor to stay in the technical position for all his career life. Though, some may consider switchover to a managerial position on various career levels. Some of these managerial positions are:
- IT Project Manager
- Security Manager
- Security Director
- Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
There are some clauses for the job of an IT Security Auditor. The following list imparts some instances for such terminologies for the same job responsibilities or identical ones. Though, a job profile like IT Auditor, for instance, comprises some other testing tasks that don’t have any significance to cybersecurity.
- Information Security Auditor
- Information Systems Auditor
- IT Auditor
How Much a Certified Information Systems Auditor Can Make?
On average, a Certified Information Systems Auditor can receive approximately $67,278 per year, as stated by PayScale. The least payment that you should expect to acquire from this job is nearly $46,027 per year, while the highest payment to expect is $102,274 per year. This explicitly involves your base annual salary, incentives, profit sharing, tips, dividend, overtime pay, and other forms of cash earnings, as relevant.
