Seeing the rapid expansion of cloud and digital transformation within organizations across the globe, one cannot overlook the risks that come with it. Digitization of business operations and workflows often involves security risks related to new technology. Hackers or cyber-criminals seem to have an expertise to find security or vulnerability loopholes to get access to your internal network. 

Once they get access to your network, it won’t take them long to take full control over your entire IT stack. Such attacks greatly impact large-scale enterprises as they can face a monetary loss of over $30 million dollars, which is far higher than an average monetary loss for SMEs. 

Penetration testing is one of the effective ways to prevent, identify and take immediate action against such attacks. Regular pen testing helps you identify known as well as unknown security vulnerabilities across your IT infrastructure. 

In this post, we are going to learn about Penetration Testing and state the top 7 reasons why Penetration Testing is a MUST for all websites:

What is Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing, also known as white-hat hacking, ethical hacking, or pen testing, is a type of security test that mimics an actual DDoS attack to assess a company’s network, systems, or software application to detect any possible security vulnerabilities. 

Penetration tests can be done on a single web application or your entire IT infrastructure, depending upon your requirements. A full-scale, deeper pen testing process is known as Red Teaming- a goal-centric adversarial process that takes a holistic view of an organization from an adversary perspective. 

A complex organization with numerous sensitive assets is likely to conduct Red Teaming to retain its IT integrity and security. 

Learn more about penetration testing.

Top 7 Reasons why Penetration Testing is Important for Websites:

• Risk Assessment:

Today digital transformation is evolving at a rapid pace amongst enterprises worldwide. In this circumstance, it is of high importance that organizations secure their IT infrastructure by filling the vulnerability loopholes so as to protect it from cyber-attacks. 

Security attacks or DDoS attacks not only hamper your operations, revenue, or business goals but also notably hinders your brand reputation, customer relationships, and goodwill. 

With full-scale penetration testing, you will be able to discover known and unknown risks within your IT infrastructure and its consequences. The results of the pen tests will provide insights on which objectives you need to prioritize and what measures you to initiate to secure your stack. 

• Meet Compliance

All entities that store, process and transmit cardholder data MUST abide by the PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) regulations. It aims to cover all operational and technical components linked to the cardholder data. Not just PCI-DSS, there are many other local financial regulations a company must look into and comply with.

Penetration testing helps organizations meet this compliance with its ongoing and annual execution. During pen tests, the company will recognize the impact of non-compliance to certain regulations, which may lead to hefty fines and undue economic loss. Not just that, failure to comply with laws and regulations may cause you to lose your operational license as well. 

Penetration tests and other security assessments will indirectly help you mitigate these non-compliance risks as it prevents data breaches.

• Maintain Privacy

It is very important for organizations to safeguard the confidentiality of their IT data at all costs. Failure to do the same may lead to legal consequences along with loss of revenue and reputation. Cyber-attacks can significantly impact the accounting records of a company, directly impeding their revenue.

Penetration testing prepares the team for immediate threat remediation. Adding to this, it also helps companies track the time taken for a cyber-criminal to breach the system.

• Secure Configurations

The final results of penetration tests are evident proof of how good your security team is and how their action-plan is heading in the right direction. Partnering with third-party security assessment services is also a good means of confirming how potent the security of your IT stack is. An outside perspective may provide invaluable insights which you may not be able to extract through internal assessments alone

Moreover, a third-party assessor will precisely be able to measure your team’s efficiency and potential to act as security operators. It helps to identify known and unknown loopholes in your system.

• Security training of the staff 

Penetration testing helps you train your network staff on how to detect, respond to and remediate cyber-attacks with precision. 

Say, for example, a security tester exposing a system to a potential vulnerability indicates their poor training on security monitoring. With Pen Testing, your network security staff will recognize and adopt the proper security measures required to fully safeguard the entire system network. 

• Testing new technologies

Before implementing any new technology across an enterprise, it is always a smart move to run pilot tests. It helps detect bugs or problems earlier before you decide to move it forward to the production stage. 

By the same token, running a penetration test on new technologies will help you fix security vulnerabilities or loopholes beforehand. Thus, it will save time and money to a great extent whilst accelerating your product’s TTM (time-to-market).

• Reputation

Data breaching attacks on your company will mightily tarnish your brand’s reputation. This may lead to a significant reduction in revenue, loss of customer loyalty, and hampered customer relationships. Additionally, investors may retract their support due to data breaches, directly affecting the share price of your company.

Hence, it is very important for companies today to take every possible measure to secure and retain their data privacy, security, and IT integrity at all costs. Failure to do so may cause operational, monetary, as well as reputation loss. 

Penetration Testing is one of the best ways to prevent DDoS attacks on your company. It not only trains your security staff to take the right measures at the right time but also helps you discover budding vulnerabilities present within your system.

Conclusion

With this, we conclude our detailed post on ‘Top 7 reasons why Penetration Testing is Important for Websites’. The key point to note is that Pen Tests mimic real-life attacks to detect vulnerabilities in systems that a cyber-criminal is likely to exploit. 

The entire process of Penetration Testing is not a one-day buzz. Rather, is a strategic, well-thought plan that an organization needs to execute timely. The frequency of running penetration tests is based upon the size, IT structure, and risk assessment ability of a company.

Also Read: Every Organization Needs These Security Experts