How Can You Benefit from Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing offers many benefits, allowing you to:
Intelligently manage vulnerabilities
Penetration testing provides detailed information on actual, exploitable security threats. By performing a penetration test, you can proactively identify which vulnerabilities are most critical, which are less significant, and which are false positives. This allows your organization to more intelligently prioritize remediation, apply needed security patches and allocate security resources more efficiently to ensure that they are available when and where they are needed most.
Avoid the cost of network downtime
Recovering from a security breach can cost an organization millions of dollars related to IT remediation efforts, customer protection and retention programs, legal activities, discouraged business partners, lowered employee productivity and reduced revenue. Penetration testing helps you to avoid these financial pitfalls by proactively identifying and addressing risks before attacks or security breaches occur.
Meet regulatory requirements and avoid fines
Penetration testing helps organizations address the general auditing/compliance aspects of regulations such as GLBA, HIPAA and Sarbanes-Oxley, and specifically addresses testing requirements documented in the PCI-DSS and federal FISMA/NIST mandates. The detailed reports that penetration tests generate can help organizations avoid significant fines for non-compliance and allow them to illustrate ongoing due diligence in to assessors by maintaining required security controls to auditors.
Preserve corporate image and customer loyalty
Even a single incident of compromised customer data can be costly in terms of both negatively affecting sales and tarnishing an organization’s public image. With customer retention costs higher than ever, no one wants to lose the loyal users that they’ve worked hard to earn, and data breaches are likely to turn off new clients. Penetration testing helps you avoid data incidents that put your organization’s reputation and trustworthiness at stake.
Protect business partner relationships
When one organization suffers a data breach or infrastructure attack, it often affects their business partners either directly or by association. With many of today’s businesses seeking reassurance from partners that they are maintaining sufficient security controls, penetration testing results highlight a commitment to proactive vulnerability assessment, risk mitigation and threat management.
Justify security investments
Most organizations have significantly increased their IT security budgets in recent years, yet struggle to derive metrics for determining return-on-investment on those assets, other than how well they’ve performed in terms of avoiding major incidents. Penetration testing provides a unique, hands-on process for both evaluating the effectiveness of existing security point products and building a case for future investments.
Satisfy prerequisites for cybersecurity insurance
Penetration testing is fast becoming a requirement for obtaining cybersecurity insurance coverage. Insurance carriers understand that the most comprehensive manner of determining how well any organizations’ defensive mechanisms and internal security policies are functioning is by carrying out regular testing to ensure that valuable assets are adequately protected.
