12 Reasons Why You Should Consider Continuous Penetration Testing

Last updated on June 23rd, 2022 at 04:30 am

As the term suggests, continuous penetration testing is a continuous approach to testing new techniques and identifying unknown risks, monthly or quarterly. Continuous penetration testing is triggered when a change is identified in your network or the threat landscape.

The following are some of the reasons why you should consider continuous penetration testing for your organization.

1. Accurate Representation of the Real World

The removal of artificial time constraints enables the simulation of a large variety of attacks.

2. Helps Stay on Par with Fast-Paced Techniques

Your team is already overloaded with tasks that require deep working knowledge about your environment. Free them up by hiring a penetration testing company that performs attacks daily to help determine whether you’re vulnerable to new techniques or not.

3. Prevents Unexpected Breaches

You might be setting yourself up for a disaster if you’re waiting until next year’s pentest to reveal new vulnerabilities. Close down the gaps and keep a constant check on vulnerabilities instead of waiting for them to be exposed. Continuous testing reduces exposure times.

4. Complies with Multi-Test Requirements

Continuous testing complies with requirements such as testing on major changes and multiple tests per year.  A report or an attestation for directors, auditors, board members, etc. can be generated at any point.

5. Cost-Effective to IT Operations

Continuous testing enables the detection of vulnerabilities at their inception, allowing you to plan the mitigation process. The time can then be budgeted towards security improvements in steadier and smaller chunks of work. This will reduce the time spent on unplanned work and make your IT operations more efficient and cheaper.

6. Addresses Challenges with DevOps and Shadow IT

Cloud and DevOps movements cause frequent changes. The security impact of these changes is identified and reported.

7. Broaden Your Staff’s Knowledge

Testers from the penetration testing company will transfer a great deal of knowledge about your environment to your staff when collaborating on the continuous testing process. Conversations with security testers can help extract valuable insights into mitigation planning and solutions.

8. Enhances Communication

Difficult and time-consuming mitigation techniques often require more communication to implement. Mitigation strategies are assisted by consultants and all progress is tracked through an interactive web portal. Real-time and historical views of testing status and activities are logged, providing visibility into all testing actions.

9. Unlimited Retesting 

Since you’re not expected to get it right on the first pass, toggle the vulnerability status in the portal and that will automatically assign the retest work, once you fix the vulnerability.

10. The Report Never Out-Dates

Priorities are bound to change whether they’re related to technology, threats, or business. Your test results are interactive and their priorities can be adjusted.

11. Maturity Model

As your company matures its security posture, testing adapts. Start with basic external testing and work towards full scope red team tests.

12. Better ROI

Hiring a penetration testing company can not only help your organization fulfill the security requirements but also financial ones. Pentesting improves ROI and while it can be hard to showcase ROI with it, continuous testing can give best insights by providing unique metrics in categories of cost-benefit analysis vs. traditional pentesting, the maturity of defenses, trends, historical data, the average time to remediate, IT staff improvements, and many more.