Free downloads
tools, guides & resourcesOn this page you will find a set of useful downloadable resources to help you improve your work or give you inspiration.
For each of these links we strongly suggest that you use a right mouse click on the link and then open the resource in a new window.
This will save you backtracking or having to reopen browser windows on previous pages.
DOWNLOADS – IT AUDIT RESOURCES
We’ve pulled together a number of themes and standards and created a top down risk-driven IT Audit Universe. You can download your copy here.
Here, Microsoft Server Security Guidance, Microsoft provides guidance to securing its flagship server technology.
The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, network inventory, any missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, security benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser. Works with all current versions of Windows Operating Systems.
Visit the Centre for Internet Security to access downloadable benchmarks for IT Security Reviews and gap analysis of internal configurations with best practice. And while you are there study the guide to the most important Cyber controls.
NIST – the National Institute of Science and Technology has published a cyber security framework and offers several videos dealing with CyberRisk.
No-one’s security toolkit should be without a number of tools targeting networks. For more than a decade, the Nmap Project has been cataloguing the network security community’s favorite tools. Access the best of them here.
Looking to create security policies or to assess your own organisation’s policies? Then go to SANS and access the many free policy templates spanning all sorts of IT related activities.
DOWNLOADS – DATA SECURITY
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has published useful downloadable guidance on the new GDPR regulations. This is a must read for all organisations that process personal data. Additionally the ICO has published supplementary guidance on data protection and surveillance in the workplace.
Does your organisation take payments using a payment card? Then visit the PCI Security Standards Council to access the self-assessment questionnaires. They will provide a valuable insight into payments auditing.
DOWNLOADS – DATA ANALYTICS TOOLS
Microsoft has produced two very interesting software contributions to the field of Data Analysis and we use both of them in a variety of ways.
Are you interested in performing comparisons of text data between, say, two spreadsheets that contain closely similar but not identical text based information? Then visit Microsoft, to get the official fuzzy data add-in for Excel that allows you to do fuzzy matching of textual data.
Perhaps you’ve admired the country or political dashboards that you’ve seen on TV or dashboards providing a visual front end to complex data? If so, visit Microsoft again, to get your copy of Microsoft Power BI (Business Intelligence) a desktop tool to visually explore your data with a freeform drag-and-drop motif, data visualisation and simple report authoring.