The Audit Services provided by our company are first and foremost confidential. And since we couldn't find a fast and safe way to make this message self destruct after being read we will avoid mentioning the names of the companies or other details.

What we may say instead is that the IT Audit Projects have been experiencing a significant growth in 2015. This is a relevant hint to confirm the process of maturation of the IT market, on which Gigahertz and Terabytes no longer mean absolutely everything within the internal processes of companies, and elements such as procedures, efficiency of available resources, process and system optimization and, maybe of paramount importance, IT security are becoming ever more relevant.

Having analyzed our most recent 10 audit projects we have found that we can divide this kind of undertakings into two distinct categories:

Optimization/Troubleshooting Audit. Scenarios are made where the beneficiary is trapped in a vicious circle, in which insufficient operating parameters of an application or of a service are contested among the hardware providers, the internet providers and the software providers, for instance, all of them blaming one another. Our specialists can objectively assess the technical circumstances in such cases and they can generate a root-cause analysis through which we report a clear and coherent set of measures that will lead to the optimization of the flawed services. Here we rely on a 10 years' experience within the framework of which we interacted with a multitude of systems and technologies, managing to build a portfolio of technical knowledge which is relevant in such cases.

Compliance/Security/Documentation Audit. The second category of audit undertakings that we may take into account is compliance audit. There are cases for certain beneficiaries in which third-party audits of the IT systems are imposed by law or by the decisions of the Board. We can actually include in the same category the audit projects carried for changes occurred in the IT support internal teams or of the various service suppliers. In such cases the management of the company wants a ''fresh start'', through which the existing systems and processes should be analyzed and documented by an external auditor. However, the common feature for this category of audit operations are the security elements. It was the right time for us to notice that the IT Security elements get special attention from those who decide budget allocations. Whether this was determined by the evolution of the sophistication degree and negative effects caused by the cyber-attacks in recent times or by the need to protect intellectual property elements within the companies, the assessment and recommendations with respect to IT Security Systems is an absolutely necessary deliverable in this category.

ETA2U is probably among the very few IT companies that can perform comprehensive audit operations, both from a procedural standpoint (ITIL standards, ISO 27001:2015 certified auditors) and from a technical standpoint, getting support from the hundreds of server and communication infrastructure projects in which our technical teams were involved. We are certain that the deliverables of an audit project performed by us are going to be a reference point often used in the current activity of the company and will not end up covered in dust in a file cabinet.

Cristian Leoveanu
ITPS Division Business Unit Manager, ETA2U