When Audits Feel Overwhelming

Recently, I ran into one of my fellow cybersecurity professionals at the grocery store. He had just completed his first annual audit cycle. My friend looked almost shell shocked. He had that blank, distant stare that said he had been run through the ringer. I knew something was up when he walked right past me, and his grocery cart, they are called buggies around here, was still empty.

After finally getting his attention and asking a few questions, he mumbled something about auditors being “paid by the pound.” I think I mentioned it was his first major audit. I asked what they had actually found.

“Well… stuff... lots of stuff. Tomorrow we’re having a jousting tournament to see who gets fired first.” It’s important to point out that there is a high correlation between prior military and cybersecurity. In my friend’s case you can add in a few drops of stand-up comedy, and it quickly becomes difficult to determine where the pithy insight and dark humor end and the Jeff Foxworthy wannabe begins.

As he was shuffling off toward frozen foods, I promised to drop by over the weekend and see if I could help. Having been interviewed as a security operations Subject Matter Expert in several dozen healthcare and banking audits, I fancied myself reasonably adept at being of some assistance.

The weekend arrived and found us firmly planted at his dining room table, papers spread out like an autopsy patient, and some football game nobody cared about roaring in the background. Just going by the size of the auditors’ final report, I could see where the “paid by the pound” comment came from. And that’s the part most people never talk about.

It’s not usually the severity of the findings that creates stress. It’s the volume.

Once the list gets long enough, it becomes difficult to tell the difference between smoldering embers and roaring fires. Leaders panic. Teams freeze. People jump straight to worst case scenarios. And then comes the blamestorming.

But here’s the truth. Most audit findings aren’t catastrophic. Make no mistake, an audit with lots of findings isn’t good, but it’s rarely insurmountable. What is needed most is a clear, prioritized path and a steady hand to take the lead.

Returning to the dining room table, the auditors had delivered their findings in both printed and digital format. The overlooked thumb drive in the packet contained a spreadsheet of identified gaps. This was good news.

It took a few hours, but by the end we had a prioritized plan to attack the IT security findings in the final report and a model that the other departments could follow if they wanted. We created timelines, deliverables, and target due dates. It was a crude template, but it had the potential to bring a measure of structure to an otherwise chaotic situation.

My friend went to work on Monday with purpose in his step and a plan in his hands. After some back and forth, the crude framework was adopted as the approach they would take to address the audit findings.

When I get called in, I usually start at the same place: the most recent audit report.

I start there because that one document tells you a lot of what you need to know to get moving. What matters now. What can wait. What is just noise. Where the quick wins are. Where the patterns are. And where leadership needs to make a decision instead of just reacting.

Audits don’t have to be overwhelming. They are just a map. And, because auditors assign priorities to their findings, they’re also a guide to the order in which the navigational beacons lie along the course from findings to being made whole. Like any map, they are only useful if you slow down long enough to read them.

If your last audit looked more like a pile of problems than a plan, you are not alone. A little clarity goes a long way.

It’s been a few weeks since that Saturday at my friend’s dining room table. He’s still a long way from complete, but there’s demonstrable progress, and it continues. The template has already been modified to produce procedures that should help future audits go smoother than the last.

I didn’t attend the celebratory happy hour. I’m sure my invitation was lost in the mail. In the end, the transformation from chaos to structure took time, thought, and a plan, but neither heroics nor magic.

If you have an audit report sitting on your desk that feels heavier than it should, send me a message. A calm conversation might go a long way toward finding a clear place to start.

Next week, we’ll shift gears a bit and talk about Artificial Intelligence. Not the scary version from the headlines, but the practical kind that’s been helping people do their jobs for years. The goal is simple. Less noise, more clarity.

Before we get into that conversation, it’s worth saying that I’m not an AI researcher nor an expert in the field. I’m just a technology generalist who became a cybersecurity specialist, and has more than thirty years in the industry. What I’ll be offering next week is simply my perspective based on what I’ve seen over the course of my career.