Penetration Testing

Benefits of Penetration Testing

Penetration testing offers many benefits, allowing you to: 

• Intelligently manage vulnerabilities 

• Avoid the cost of network downtime 

• Meet regulatory requirements and avoid fines 

• Preserve corporate image and customer loyalty 

As you can see, obtaining a penetration-testing software or hiring a pen-tester to
test your network is a proactive effort of protecting your network and business from risks
before attacks or security breaches occur. 

Why Perform Pen-Tests

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Security breaches and service interruptions are costly.

Security breaches and any related interruptions in the performance of services or
applications, can result in direct financial losses, threaten organizations’ reputations,
erode customer loyalties, attract negative press, and trigger significant fines and penalties. 

It is impossible to safeguard all information, all the time. 

Traditionally, organizations have sought to prevent breaches by installing and maintaining
layers of defensive security mechanisms, including user access controls, cryptography, IPS,
 IDS and firewalls. However, continued adoption of new technologies, including some of
these security systems, has made it even harder to find and eliminate all of an organizations
’ vulnerabilities and protect against many types of potential security incidents.

Penetration-testing identifies and prioritizes security risks. 

Pen-testing evaluates an organization’s ability to protect its networks, applications,
endpoints and users from external or internal attempts to circumvent its security controls to
gain unauthorized or privileged access to protected assets.  

How Often You Should Perform Pen-Tests

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Penetration testing should be performed on a regular basis to ensure more consistent IT
and network security management. A pen-tester will reveal how newly discovered threats
or emerging vulnerabilities may potentially be assailed by attackers. In addition to regularly
scheduled analysis and assessments required by regulatory mandates, tests should also be
run whenever: 

• New network infrastructure or applications are added 

• Significant upgrades or modifications are applied to infrastructure or applications 

• New office locations are established 

• Security patches are applied 

• End user policies are modified 

How You Can Benefit From Pen-Tests

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Intelligently manage vulnerabilities

 Pen-tests provide detailed information on actual, exploitable security threats. By performing
 a penetration-test, you can proactively identify which vulnerabilities are more 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 effectively 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 and more. 

Meet regulatory requirements and avoid fines 

Penetration testing helps organizations address the general auditing/compliance aspects
of regulations. The detailed reports that pen-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 

Every 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.