Back­ground:

Welsh Consulting was hired to conduct a strategic computer systems audit for a Boston-based company seeking to be acquired. Due to years of frequent turnover among the company’s IT staff, no docu­men­tation existed regarding the firm’s computer systems. Addi­tionally, third– party vendors were being paid to provide outsourced services, yet no contracts could be found and business critical IT systems had not been audited for several years.

This scenario was causing company management to lose sleep as they feared any unex­pected network downtime, data loss, security breach or the possi­bility that a potential acquirer would view them nega­tively due to the poor state of their current network and computer envi­ronment. Furthermore, many company employees were expe­ri­encing frequent computer system problems which were signif­i­cantly impacting their productivity.

Project Objec­tives:

• Evaluate the company’s business require­ments as they relate to their IT systems
• Evaluate the company’s network and computer systems
• Evaluate third-party IT vendors, service agree­ments and quality of service
• Provide the company with detailed docu­men­tation of their network and computer systems infra­structure and third-party systems, a prior­i­tized summary of tech­nical issues adversely impacting their business and a prior­i­tized list of recom­men­da­tions to reme­diate these issues

Welsh Consulting’s Solution:

After assessing the company’s current business oper­a­tions, Welsh Consulting conducted a thorough analysis of the company’s LAN and WAN envi­ron­ments, as well as other key systems hosted by third parties (websites, managed hosting, etc.). This analysis of the company’s systems consisted of a thorough review of all network systems, computer systems and business appli­ca­tions. The current oper­ation, config­u­ration and capa­bil­ities of these systems were mapped to business require­ments in order to determine where gaps existed. In addition to this require­ments analysis, Welsh Consulting eval­uated each system indi­vid­ually to determine whether any improper config­u­ra­tions existed which could cause system problems, security vulner­a­bil­ities, etc.

Upon completing the data collection phase of the project, Welsh Consulting spent approx­i­mately three weeks analyzing the data that was collected, conducted several addi­tional conver­sa­tions with key company personnel and compiled the findings of our audit into a deliv­erable document.

A deliv­erable document was then developed and presented to company management.

Results:

The results of our audit provided our client with a thorough analysis of the state of their IT systems. Our audit uncovered numerous vulner­a­bil­ities and improper config­u­ra­tions that both put the company’s business oper­a­tions at risk and impeded business productivity.

Our audit document also provided our client with a prior­i­tized list of recom­mended actions which became the working document for reme­di­ating these issues over the following months.

Almost all of Welsh Consulting’s recom­men­da­tions were imple­mented and approx­i­mately one year after the completion of our audit, our client was success­fully acquired by a public company.