Table of Content
- What is Penetration Testing?
- The Advantages of Penetration Testing
- What Should You Do After a Pen Test?
Cyber-attacks have been the norm in recent years. These assaults may have a significant impact on your company’s IT infrastructure. As a result, your company must conduct systematic penetration testing and vulnerability scans to discover vulnerabilities and ensure that cyber controls are operational. Companies that offer information security services may help you with penetration testing.
What is Penetration Testing?
It is an approved and proactive effort to analyze the security of the IT infrastructure by methodically attempting to exploit system vulnerabilities such as operating system, incorrect configuration, service and application failures, and even risky end-user behaviour. These assessments are also useful for validating the efficiency of defensive mechanisms and end-user adherence to security protocols.
The Advantages of Penetration Testing
There are multiple benefits to doing penetration testing. Scroll down to learn about some of its potential advantages.
Identifies and organizes security risks
Through frequent and comprehensive penetration testing, organizations may anticipate emerging security risks more effectively and avert unauthorized access to key information and critical systems. A pen test assesses an organization’s capacity to defend its applications, networks, users, and endpoints against internal and external efforts to circumvent security restrictions in order to gain privileged or unauthorized access to protected assets. The results of the tests establish the danger presented by specific security flaws or poor procedures, enabling IT management and security specialists to plan remedial activities.
Check vulnerabilities
Pen Test provides in-depth information on actual and susceptible security risks. By doing a penetration test, a business may proactively identify which vulnerabilities are the most dangerous, which are less important, and which are false positives. This enables firms to more effectively plan remediation, implement critical security updates, and allocate security personnel to ensure that they are available whenever and wherever they are needed the most.
Avoid the rate of network downtime.
Recovering from a security issue may cost a company a lot of money in terms of IT remediation operations, retention programs and customer protection, legal actions, lower revenues, decreased staff production, and disillusioned business partners. Penetration testing assists a company in avoiding these financial stumbling blocks by proactively discovering and mitigating vulnerabilities before security breaches or assaults occur.
Maintain customer loyalty and the company’s image.
Even a single instance of tainted consumer data may be costly in terms of both negatively impacting sales and tarnishing a company’s reputation. Penetration testing assists a business in preventing data events that might jeopardize the company’s reputation and dependability.
Service disruptions and security breaches are often costly.
Security flaws, as well as any related interruptions in the functioning of applications or services, may result in direct economic losses, erode an organization’s image, erode customer loyalty, lure unwanted coverage, and create notable fines and penalties. These costs are minimized since the organization employs such testing on a regular basis.
There are several penetration testing firms that can assist your corporation in avoiding all IT infrastructure evasions. It is preferable for your company to stay protected in the past than incur severe monetary and reputational damage.
What Should You Do After a Pen Test?
Going through the findings of pen testing is a wonderful way to discuss future strategies and reassess your overall security posture. Pen tests should not be seen as a hurdle to jump through, and just ticking them off a list as “done” will not enhance your security posture. It is critical to schedule a post-mortem to distribute, discuss, and fully comprehend the results. Furthermore, communicating these findings with actionable insights to organizational decision-makers would better underline the danger that these vulnerabilities represent and the beneficial effect that repair will have on the company. Pentest findings may be transformed into action items for immediate improvements and takeaways that will assist create wider security initiatives through review, assessment, and leadership buy-in.
