Why Organizations Should Look at Penetration Testing
October 11, 2017
Today’s blog is brought to you by Todd Palma. Todd brings over a decade of technology sales experience to Brite. Through working with organizations of all shapes and sizes, he has been able to identify and respond to market place trends.
Hackers and cyber thieves are getting more creative every day in an effort to gain access to valuable data within organizations. How does one stay ahead of these resourceful hackers? Penetration testing often is a key component. Penetration testing is a manual, authorized, simulated attack on a network that looks for security weaknesses within a system’s features and data. These days it is imperative for organizations to have penetration testing done for many reasons;
Reasons why companies should consider Pen Testing ASAP:
- Uncover Hidden Vulnerabilities Before Hackers Do
It’s a true test of the effectiveness of your existing protections and it clearly reveals where your organization is leaving doors open for cybercriminals to enter.
- Maintain Compliance Requirements – PCI, HIPAA, etc.
While Pen Testing does not provide a full compliance audit, If you have enough credit card transaction volume to be bound by PCI or if you are storing Protected Health Information (PHI), or HIPAA data you MUST perform penetration testing.
- Evaluate Company Monitoring and Response Effectiveness
An active pen test provides the opportunity to evaluate how IT staff responds in a real-life security incident.
- Gain Executive Management Support for Change
The internal IT team may know that a vulnerability exists, but because they aren’t able to demonstrate the weakness effectively, management may not realize the potential risks of not adding the resources.
The bottom line is, attackers are coming at your company and its data by any means possible. In order to see not only how they get in but where they can go once they get in, penetration testing can show you the lateral movement to help your organization and your security operations team work together to block those paths to your most valuable asset, your data!
Interested in learning more on penetration testing? Reach out to us and one of penetration testing experts will walk you through the benefits to your organization!
