Techopedia, an IT education website that provides insight and inspiration to IT professionals and technology decision-makers, defines network auditing as “the collective measures done to analyze, study and gather data about a network with the purpose of ascertaining its health in accordance with the network/organization requirements.”
A typical network audit reviews each node of a network, network control and security processes, network monitoring processes, and other data.
The person who is performing the network audit — typically a network administrator — wants to know what network devices are connected to the network, which operating systems they are running, and how are they configured. In the past, it was possible to relatively easily obtain all this information manually, but that’s no longer the case today.
Modern organizations rely on significantly more complex networks than the organizations of the past, using a mix of cloud and in-house resources to accomplish their business objectives. It’s unreasonable to expect IT departments to keep track of hundreds and possibly thousands of network devices without any help.
Fortunately, there are now many network audit tools to choose from, including Network Inventory Advisor, which we describe in greater detail in the last chapter of this article.