Understanding And Auditing It Systems, Volume 1 (Second Edition) Book

The complex and integrated nature of IT systems, along with the diversified patterns of implementation, causes the correct security implementation and audits of IT systems to be very difficult without the proper knowledge of the basic skeletons of the systems including the hardware architecture, operating systems, RDBMS, networks and communications, application development process, internal control issues and others.

This book makes these diverse issues easily accessible by presenting the core concepts and practice issues in an organized and orderly pattern. These discussions not only enable the effective and efficient audits of IT systems but any additional IT system issues can be easily challenged based on these since the discussions are well-rounded and truly scalable.

This book presents the insightful and workable guidelines to enable the knowledgeable audits of IT systems by addressing most of the pertinent issues for the security implementation and audits of the IT systems.

This book discusses, in a single volume, a variety of technical, operational and security-related issues relevant to the implementation of the IT systems for easy accessibility by the readers. It addresses many of the key concepts and implementation/assessment issues necessary for in-depth understanding and audits of the IT systems.

This book approaches the security and internal control issues in the IT systems environment by analyzing the brick-and-mortar skeletons of the system implementations from the very lowest layer and then progressing to the operations and other higher level implementation features and hence the discussions are tangible in the hands of the readers.

This book addresses the security and internal control issues in the perspectives of the standalone computer systems and the network environments in separate phases for more focused discussions of the different security and implementation requirements.

This book presents an extensive coverage of the data communication and network issues in recognition of the massive communication requirements, including the e-commerce system applications, and the serious vulnerability exposures in this area in modern business organizations.

This book presents a new paradigm for categorization of the control objectives in the IT systems environment for both the general operational and financial control perspectives for the effective coverage of the vulnerability exposures in these two areas. These discussions are particularly useful in the implementation of the regulatory requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the US and for compliance with GAAP in the IT systems environment.

• The practical operations and security implementation features of the real-life computer systems incl. the IBM & HP computer systems and the Unix operating systems.
• The coverage of the object-oriented systems and concepts relative to the traditional structured approaches to the systems development.
• The extensive coverage of the RDBMS from data modeling and SQL implementations to the transaction concepts and security & audit issues.
• The in-depth coverage of the communications, cryptography and e-commerce issues.
• The security implementation and audits in the open network environment.