Preparing for cybersecurity audits: best practices for 2025

Organizations facing compliance mandates and audits must adopt a proactive, automated approach to safeguard their digital assets. Along with compliance and audits, companies need to realign their auditing preparation to include more automation and streamline auditing reporting processes. 

Regular manual security audits completed by third-party vendors might soon be replaced with AI automation. Without compliance AI automation, organizations will struggle to keep up with cybersecurity threats, security vulnerabilities, and compliance mandates. 

Tibreaker AI provides extensive compliance automation capability, enabling organizations with faster content consolidation, analysis, and insights. 

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Understanding cybersecurity audits 

The numbers don’t lie: 

“Cybercrime is expected to cost organizations $10.5 trillion annually by 2025.”  

With rising cyber threats, companies must prioritize security audits to protect their business and customer data from attacks. 

Cybersecurity audits continue to be critical in an organization's ability to report to shareholders, the board of directors, employees, customers, and external compliance regulators. Reporting accurately is a legal and business obligation all organizations are required to adhere to. 

Auditing applications, databases, cybersecurity protection, security operations capabilities, and upkeep of security policies alignment with compliance mandates are mandates of audits. Without audits, organizations will become less secure and challenged with their ability to report their security posture accurately. 

Compliance audits in 2025 will continue to focus on the several existing core areas of any company: 

• Check-ins of vulnerability and exploits across critical systems, users, and devices 

• Improvement of the organization's overall security posture 

• Staying ensure that data is fully encrypted 

• Sustaining customer’s trust by staying compliant with the most important standards, such as ISO 27001. 

Tips for getting ready for an audit in 2025 

2025 will increase cybersecurity complexity powered by adversarial AI and machine learning attack capabilities. Organizations deploying their AI and ML defensive tools is a sound step in the right direction. Internal auditors must enhance their abilities to validate that these next-generation tools function as expected and lower the risk to the organization's attack surface. 

Best practice 1: Change the frequency of assessments and scope 

Organizations investing in AI-powered defensive capabilities must engage third-party assessment teams to validate their protection capabilities far sooner than quarterly or annually. Hackers leveraging their AI change alter their attack within seconds. Organization audits need to ensure their security operations teams and risk management teams can adjust their defensive tools to stay current with the hacker's capabilities. 

Best practice 2: Automation of policy and regulation review 

In previous years, regulators and compliance-mandated organizations published yearly or semi-yearly changes to their various standards. With the rapid changes to the global threat landscape, organizations need to increase their policy document review process against updated compliance and changes in privacy regulations. The frequency of these changes from the various compliance regulators will vary; adopting AI automation for compliance review will help expedite the process and help organizations adjust their defensive capabilities sooner. 

Best practice 3: Update security policy documentation to reflect changes in risk 

Security breaches within vendor products continue as hackers continue to target SaaS-based security platforms, legacy network devices, and identity management systems. Organizations should not wait for budget cycles to implement changes to their security posture and defensive strategy. 

Automated compliance, documentation review and updates based on these rapid changes, along with validation against ISO 27001 or other frameworks, help keep the organization in the best position for the next audit cycle. 

Why is it important to follow common sense rules for audits for 2025? 

Organizations that don't structure their audit preparations and oversight effectively remain vulnerable, despite investing heavily in cybersecurity tools, talent, and audit services. 

Internal audits and the C-level need to develop an auditing and compliance plan to align with industry basic principles: 

Competence 

Does the organization have experienced internal audits and compliance resources? Organizations that leverage existing non-auditing background resources tend to waste money and time during the auditing preparation phase. Collecting, processing, and reporting audit artifacts requires experienced resources that understand the mandates and requirements. 

Quality control 

Like any compliance or privacy auditing cycle, human error happens. Internal team members collect the wrong information, internal auditors are not up to date on the latest changes to various regulations, and external auditing preparation firms overcharge and underdeliver. 

Reducing human error through automation and a simple, repeatable process helps lower the cost of audit preparation while streamlining processes, which helps the organization become better prepared for external auditors. This step also helps reduce the overall cost of auditing and compliance operations. 

Documentation 

Manual collection and review of internal security policies, operations reports, and security posture sourced from different places continues to add complexity, confusion, and delays in audit preparation. 

Leveraging AI automation for compliance review of documents and collected artifacts against the more current compliance regulations is a major step in reducing time, human error, and cost. Organizations still relying on human intervention regarding policy review against updated standards continue to add more time and error, leading to challenges in passing their various audits. 

Automated reporting and collaboration workspaces 

Automation for policy and compliance review is already proving effective in helping companies streamline their review process, lower their compliance and audit operations costs, and reduce human error. Another critical component of audit preparation is that stakeholders access separate instances of information and reports. 

Organizations wanting to reduce human error further invest in automated compliance functionality with a centralized view of the results in one place. Leveraging a unified compliance view helps reduce reporting duplication, ensuring every stakeholder supporting the auditing and compliance has access to the same information and reporting. Previously, data collected and processed for auditing became very siloed. Compliance automation and centralized reporting bring critical new capabilities for organizations to help optimize their audit preparation. 

Reducing overlapping and duplication of efforts in audit preparation 

Successful audits happen due to precise planning, proper resource allocation, and communication. Designating the auditing administrator is one of the most critical investments organizations must make when preparing for audit season 2025. As audit requirements change, the auditing administrator must help develop revisions to previous efforts and incorporate the upcoming changes. They are automating these changes through current document review with the latest online resources, which is a significant step in simplifying the audit administrator's role. 

Another valuable component of AI automation for compliance is reducing duplication of efforts and overlapping processes by the audit administrator. Overlapping processes, including processing results of third-party assessment and penetration, become duplicated without a clear structure for audit preparation. Duplication often occurs when organizations rely on part-time resource allocation from IT, risk, cybersecurity, HR, and compliance teams. 

Preparing for audits continues to be an expensive reality for any organization, regardless of size or market sector. Organizations' ability to operate within a specific regulated market is required to pass external mandates from the regulators governing specific sectors, including healthcare, defense, government, and finance. 

Ultimately, passing an external audit gives the organization the confidence they are taking the proper steps in lowering the risk against their various attack surfaces. 

What role does AI compliance automation for audits in 2025? 

In 2025, AI will play an increasing role in compliance audits.. Internal controls, including applications moving between development, staging, and production, data replication across cloud carriers are also areas auditors will examine in 2025. 

Automating these processes is critical for organizations to ensure they are less exposed to security threats and data leaks than in previous years. Audits looking for fraud attacks based on hacker attack automation will examine the organization's defensive capabilities to stop these attacks. Auditors will look for compliance automation to streamline their compliance review of the organization's documentation and policy adoptions while maintaining proper audit trails and financial reporting. 

Why Tiebreaker AI? 

The future of auditing will continue to blend automation and human interaction. Compliance mandates will continue to ask for audits, which will be even greater in complexity and time. 

Tiebreaker AI includes features that lower costs and simplify auditing processes through automation. 

Ready to simplify audit preparation? 

Start preparing for 2025’s challenges today. Tiebreaker AI empowers your organization to stay ahead with cutting-edge compliance automation. 

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