Financial Services Audit-Readiness Checklist

An auditor doesn't ask whether you have a SIEM. They ask you to produce something: a complete, timestamped, unaltered record of what happened on a given system, across a given window. This two-page checklist gives you a pipeline-first way to test whether your telemetry would hold up under audit, across seven areas that map to DORA, NIS2, PCI DSS, SOX, GLBA, NYDFS, FFIEC, and SEC requirements. Check what you can honestly answer yes to today. The items you can't check are your roadmap.

What's in the checklist

• Coverage: whether every in-scope system feeds your pipeline, including end-of-life and 32-bit Windows hosts, mainframes, IBM AIX, core-banking platforms, and air-gapped or OT segments

• Completeness and integrity: timestamping at collection, gap detection, file integrity monitoring, and a tamper-evident stored record with no undocumented sampling or dropped sources

• Retention: full-fidelity records kept for the longest applicable framework window, independent of your SIEM, and retrievable on demand

• Data protection: PII and cardholder-data redaction at the source, role-based access to telemetry, and logged access to the logs themselves

• Framework mapping: whether you can name the exact log source and query that proves each control, and produce it without reconstructing it mid-audit

• Cost sustainability: whether you can keep complete coverage without your ingestion bill forcing you to drop sources

• Resilience and independence: a collection layer separate from your SIEM, buffering through destination downtime, and repeatable source onboarding

• A scoring guide that tells you where to focus first based on how many items you could check

Download the checklist to score your own estate, then use the unchecked items as your punch list before the next audit cycle.