Cyber Readiness: 7 Key Reasons Your Organisation Should Invest in Penetration Testing

As data breaches become the order of the day, turning up your defences is critical. Penetration testing can help you identify the loopholes and more!

Did you know that by the end of 2021, hacking had cost global businesses around $6 trillion?

A successful cyberattack is the worst nightmare of every business. At best, news of a data breach will cause damage to your company’s reputation. At worst, you or your client’s sensitive information could fall into the hands of criminals, with potentially far-reaching consequences. The threat to your business is accurate, and it isn’t going away any time soon.

Every business worth its salt puts strong measures to reduce the risk of a successful cyberattack. The new malware and attack methods pop up every day. However, you can’t rest on your laurels. The only way to be sure about how strong your defences are is to put them to the test. The most successful way to measure this is with penetration testing.

Read on as we look at some of the key reasons your business must invest in penetration testing.

1. Gain an Outside Perspective

You have your best people working on your online security. They work hard and are diligent. They have a wealth of expertise in cybersecurity. Nothing will get past them.

One of the most common problems in this scenario is that it’s too easy to miss something in the bigger picture when you’re too close to the problem. That’s why penetration testing is so important. By bringing in fresh eyes from outside the company to try to breach your security safely, you may find that you’ve missed a vulnerability that you couldn’t see. The trouble is that that same vulnerability may also be how your business gets breached.

Penetration testing doesn’t know what you have in place, how you’ve set it up, or why. It’s impartial and impersonal, so it often finds oversight vulnerabilities due to simply being too close to the picture. That outside perspective could be the difference between your systems being reasonably secure and secure.

2. Target Your Spending

It’s one of the most burning questions for any business: how much spending on cybersecurity is enough? There’s always more than that, but no company has a bottomless pit of money to spend on it.

Penetration testing can help because it can show exactly where you need to focus your spending. You might find that your network security is strong, but your mobile app has many vulnerabilities. Maybe it’s your server that’s most at risk. By discovering where your security gaps lie, you can spend money where it most needs to be paid, rather than spreading it thinly and trying to cover all possible options when some of them might be secure already. 

Penetration testing allows you to spend smarter on your IT security.

3. Save Money

Another significant financial benefit of penetration testing is that it can save you money. Potentially a lot of money.

As we’ve already seen, penetration testing allows you to target your cybersecurity, so you’re not overspending on areas that don’t need it. More importantly, penetration testing will enable you to find genuine vulnerabilities before the hackers do. As we found out at the top of the article, the cost of a breach to a business can be enormous and potentially bring a company to its knees. Sadly, many examples of companies have closed their doors for good following a cyberattack.

Another way penetration testing can help save you money is by protecting you from facing any fines for breaches of regulations such as GDPR. We’ll take a closer look at this later in the article.

Be proactive in the security assessment approach rather than feeling sorry later when the data breach happens.

 Either to fix the security gap. Or face regulatory fines, it makes much more sense to invest in penetration testing and ensure that your information in the organisation is as secure and compliant as possible. 

4. Find Your Weaknesses Before They Become a Problem

If your security isn’t up to scratch, there are two ways you can find out. 

The first is when you get that horrific call telling you that your company has had a significant breach. Once this happens, it’s already too late. Your company and its reputation are going to take a substantial hit.

The other way you can find out is through penetration testing. The good news is that if penetration testing finds a weakness, then you can do something about it before someone exploits that vulnerability to hack your business. Every vulnerability penetration testing finds that you subsequently shore up is one more minor route through gaining an initial foothold to your company or minimising the attack.

Some companies find penetration testing unpalatable; it can feel uncomfortable to let outsiders pry into your business and find its weaknesses. However, wouldn’t you let attack simulation rather than the people doing that be doing it at your request, rather than with evil intent?

5. Put Your Systems to the Test

You can’t consider any system secure unless there is a proper defence-in-depth testing strategy. 

You can have as many state-of-the-art cybersecurity systems in place as you want, but until someone tries to breach those defences, you’ll never know if they’re powerful enough. Penetration testing is the only way your systems can be proven to work.

Penetration testing gives you insights by breaching r your information systems in a contained environment, but it also lets you see how effectively you can mitigate that breach. Does a breach grant access to every bit of data your company holds, or do you have other systems that can keep at least some of your data safe from prying eyes?

Penetration testing will give you an accurate picture of where you stand fighting off a real-life cyberattack.

6. Revise Your Response

Penetration testing doesn’t just give you insight into your vulnerabilities. It can also help you revise your responses to an attack. 

Every company needs a clear incident response plan when it comes to cyberattacks. Every team member should know precisely when a Cyber Attack happens. And this is where the simulation of attacks comes into play. That includes identifying an attack, containing it, eradicating it, and recovering from it. Note down each step in the plan. 

Ensure that the damage is kept to a minimum if the worst happens.

A penetration test is a great way to implement this plan and see its effectiveness. Based on the outcome, you can rework your response plan to make it as effective as possible.

7. Help to Meet Compliance Requirements

In the information era, data is everything. Clients and customers trust companies with their sensitive data and expect them to keep it safe. So do governments and industries, so there are many regulations and standards for storing and protecting data.

Many of these standards require some form of penetration testing to ensure that data is as secure as possible. Some standards require penetration testing and insist upon regular penetration testing to ensure that no new vulnerabilities crop up over time.

If you want to meet all of your compliance requirements, you’ll likely need to do penetration testing. For example, article 32 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires organisations to implement a process for regularly testing, assessing and evaluating the effectiveness of technical and organisational measures for ensuring the security of the processing.’

It’s a long-winded way of telling that you need to test your security measures, and penetration testing is one of the most sought after as it is most effective. In other words, by taking advantage of regular penetration testing, your company can tick off this aspect of GDPR and ensure that you’re fully compliant. There are many other sets of rules requiring similar testing procedures, so regular penetration testing can help you stay compliant with many regulations.

Are You Looking For High-Quality Penetration Testing?

We’re here for you if you need high-quality penetration testing for your business.

We offer a wide range of penetration testing services, including infrastructure penetration, WebApps Pen Test, Network PenTest, Server PenTest, and Mobile Apps Pen testing. We offer various security assessment solutions, such as vulnerability assessment and OSINT or Reconnaissance. 

We can help you be proactive and disrupt the intruders of your business. You can avoid costly legal and regulatory fines and help to build trust in your industry.

Check out our range of pentesting solutions today.