An audit is one of the essential activities to create recommendations and identify any malicious activity in the system by internal or external interference. An audit becomes especially important if your application needs to be compliant as per regulatory body requirements—for example, PCI, HIPPA, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and so on. Most of the compliant regulatory bodies need to conduct regular audits and verify each activity going into the system to prepare a compliance report and grant a certificate.

An audit is essential to prevent and detect security events. A hacker may silently get into your system and systematically steal information without anyone noticing. Regular security audits can uncover a hidden threat. You may want to conduct a regular audit for cost optimization to identify if resources are running idle when not required. Also, determine resource demand and available capacity so that you can plan.

In addition to alert and monitoring, the operations team is also responsible for saving the system from any threat by enabling and conducting the audit. An IT audit makes sure you safeguard IT assets and license protection and that you ensure data integrity and operations adequately to achieve your organizational goal. 

Auditing steps include planning, preparing, evaluation, and reporting. Any risk item needs to be highlighted in the report, and follow-ups will be conducted to address open issues. For operational excellence, the team can perform internal audit checks to make sure all systems are healthy and that proper alerts are in place to detect any incidents.