Penetration Testing & Business Innovation

Living in the 21st Century, with ease and innovation all around the globe, do you still believe in the traditional way of operating businesses? The word “Innovation” itself carries deep meaning in it. It means that something that is in a continuous state of being alteration and change. People like us need to understand that to what extent the world has been improved with the help of innovation. And what take back this innovation? For sure the reason behind the rapid demand for innovation is the fortunes that technology has created for mankind, all over the globe. But do you think we are utilizing innovation and technology to its fullest? Are we capable enough to utilize it? Or are we lacking anything in this regard? Have you ever thought of it? If No, then do it now, you’ll be having nightmares to know about the reality. 

Let’s take a ride in the software development industry. Innovation and technology have made it necessary for organizations to come up with something unique, creative, and customer attention-seeking element in their software products and services. To make this possible, software testing is said to be a mandatory process. That’s the trickiest among all the stages of the software development life-cycle. Under this stage, a team of quality assurance professionals has to decide what type of testing would they go for to get the maximum advantage from their software product against the hacking risks involved. At this time, penetration testing comes in as one of the best options for organizations to successfully tackle all their cyber concerns. 

But do you think simple and traditional penetration testing services would be able to suffice complex organizational needs in complicated situations and scenarios? The methods and ways we go to get our business operations done need some change with the change in market standards, with the innovative needs and expectations of end-users, and to comply with the current trends of the world. In this crucial time, standard penetration testing models would leave organizations in the dark. 

Penetration Testing – An Overview

Let me remind you that penetration testing is such a worth investing method of hunting software products and applications, errors, and glitches that can destroy a product from scratch because they risk exploitation by malicious hackers. As it’s a need for organizations to use online and virtual mediums of business operations to cope up with the increasing demands of end-users regarding smart and efficient service delivery. With this extensive use and an increased rate of dependency upon cloud mediums, the rise in cyber-attacks is more than ever before. Cyber threats are in full swing because where technology has given rise to various fortunes for organizations, it has made it easier for hackers to be successful in their plans of getting to the systems and stealing the valuable & sensitive customer and organizational data, stored in the systems. 

That’s the reason penetration testing is critical for an organization to make it’s software products pure and secure from all the cyber attackers and criminals around the globe. We usually call pen testing ethical hacking because, under this method, testers are officially authorized to get into the system and behave like hackers to observe that what vulnerabilities are there in the system and how they can be fixed timely. 

The current way of Utilizing pen testing by organizations 

Presently, many organizations follow a practice of implementing and conducting penetration testing either annually or bi-annually. Normally these pen testing services are acquired from any third party organization and then reports of testing are collected from the service providers regarding the vulnerabilities and errors in the systems. Organizations then analyze the results and suggestions provided by third-party pen testing companies to fix those spotted errors and data breaches. However, organizations need to grasp that if they’ll manage their fixture of software vulnerabilities, they’ll not get resolved, instead a wastage of time and efforts will be made. 

Most of the time service providers hand over a lengthy PDF file of suggestions and recommendations on the vulnerabilities they’ve detected in their customer’s software product and application. To extract out a list of possible and most effective fixtures from that list is often inefficient because of the time it takes to analyze a long list of pages. This way of conducting pen testing is inefficient because it does not make it clear that which of the errors are being fixed and which are not. 

Business Innovation and Pen testing – Does it go hand in hand?

Something that organizations can do for their benefit is to adopt a modern model of penetration testing either by acquiring services from third parties. The modern model is known as “Pen Testing As Service”. The scope of this model constitutes a 1-year participation activity, in which the supplier performs penetration testing as it is required by the customer organization and provides the results in an interactive cloud-based platform to provide continuous support throughout the repair cycle. This allows the customer to focus on the starting position of the work rather than the completion position of the pen tester.

Pen testing as a service model is effective and is highly recommended because of a variety of reasons. Some of them are as under;

• Cost-efficient as compared to the conventional pen-testing method
• More flexible and scalable
• Keeps up the pace with the continuous change or innovation in the business sector
• PTaaS model provides these reports in an interactive Platform enabling each vulnerability to be addressed much more effectively and efficiently
• Direct access to your cybersecurity experts and vulnerability hunters rather than fixing errors on your own

Summarizing it all

Since it’s an age of innovation, organizations need to develop their software products and application to have a better market share but protecting this software from cyber threats is challenging that can be resolved easily by conducting pen-testing. But keep in mind, traditional pen testing can not always solve all your security concerns. PTaas Model is a good decision in this regard.