You might be wondering, “what is penetration testing?” Penetration tests, or pen tests, are used to simulate a cyberattack against a business’s systems. Penetration testing services help teams to identify vulnerabilities and find ways to patch them. Various types of pen testing exist. Often, the process involves attempted breaches for several systems at once.
Insights gained from penetration testing services help a company safeguard and grow as a business. The benefits come in many forms, but these five are at the top of the list.
1. Recognize and Reduce Risks With Penetration Testing
When done regularly, penetration testing enables an organization to evaluate its many applications. It also checks both internal and external network security. Pen testing helps teams understand what controls they need to have over their security. It shows where they’re failing to protect the organization’s assets. As such, thorough risk assessment and reduction is a major perk associated with proper pen testing.
Penetration testing services allow an organization to prioritize the risks it wants to evaluate. Top risks to avoid are those that threaten the organization’s people and most important data. Companies can then analyze what they need to do to anticipate those risks. From there, they can protect themselves from the identified risks and prevent malicious attacks.
2. Prevent Real-Life Hacker Penetration
One thing that makes penetration testing so useful is its accuracy. It’s as close as you can get to simulating a hack from a real-life hacker. Regular pen testing empowers an organization to be as responsive and proactive as it can be. Each pen test allows you to evaluate your infrastructure and security at each level. When a real-life scenario does turn up, you’ll be prepared.
Since penetration testing services reveal holes in an organization’s security, it gives teams the opportunity to remediate shortcomings. Those shortcomings would otherwise be exploited by an attacker. So, pen testing makes barriers that much stronger to mediate future risks. The result is that organizations are able to prevent real-life penetration.
3. Comply With Industry Regulations With Penetration Testing
Compliance is a major concern for today’s organizations. New and highly complex regulations regarding security and data privacy continue to emerge and evolve. Penetration tests can play a major role in helping organizations. Pen testing enables them to address relevant compliance issues and come up with appropriate responses more quickly.
Industry regulations, like PCI, HIPAA, and FISMA require a great deal of due diligence. Pen testing can help reinforce such due diligence. By remaining dedicated to security, organizations can remain in compliance with relevant regulations. They can also avoid the hefty fines that come along with failure to comply.
4. Avoid Costly Breaches and Leaks
Data breaches and data leaks can easily add up to millions of dollars in expenses. Recovering from such events requires a stack of IT remediation, legal fees, and customer programs. Not to mention a loss in sales and loss in consumer trust, which sometimes lasts for years. The cost of a data breach averages $158 per sensitive record in the United States. As time goes by, that cost is only going up.
By scheduling penetration testing as part of your routine security checks and analyses, your organization can help prevent such problems. That not only saves you endless hours and dollars, it also helps protect your reputation amongst consumers. Now more than ever, customers expect organizations to prioritize their privacy. Pen testing will help you do it.
5. Identify Gaps in Training Procedures
Training procedures can make or break an organization’s security. After all, human error is considered the No. 1 security threat to every modern business. It could be an employee sending sensitive information on an unsecured network. It could be a team member bringing a personal device to work that lacks proper security. It could be many people failing to follow proper password protocols.
On the surface, human error may seem minuscule next to all the complex protections your organization has implemented. However, insufficient training procedures stand to counteract even the best security policies. The IBM Cyber Security Intelligence Index Report reveals that “human error was a major contributing cause in 95% of all breaches.”
Penetration testing can help reveal where you’ve fallen short. Use penetration testing certification to ramp up your training procedures. Doing so will help you cut out the biggest security risks your organization is currently overlooking.
How to Use Penetration Testing at Your Company
Implementing penetration testing services and pursuing penetration testing certification requires a plan. It also requires the involvement and dedication of your entire organization. Just like in a real-life cyberattack, all of your employees must be on board. Alerting relevant parties, mitigating risks, and responding to the threat in a responsible, coherent, and proactive manner is essential.
When used correctly, penetration testing certification can prove to be one of the biggest assets to your company’s security. The question is, where do you begin? Using penetration testing services to safeguard your business starts with an expert. The right partner can help you build a reputation of trust and improve security across the board.
Contact Locus today to get matched with the best pen testing expert for your company and start reaping the benefits of proactive security testing.
