Is Annual Penetration Testing Outdated?

How often does your network change? If you are like most organizations, assets are added and removed from the network, and new solutions are implemented throughout the year.

How often are new vulnerabilities identified? This happens almost daily, certainly weekly.

So why do most organizations only run penetration tests annually when changes occur much more frequently? The easy answer is cost. Manual penetration testing can be more than 10% of the IT security budget, so it's not cost-effective to multiply that by 12 for monthly testing. Large networks use sampling of internal IPs, which can take years of rotating the sample sets to hit every asset.

The solution? Managed Autonomous Testing (MAT) combines the intelligence of the human tester with the power of automation, making it feasible to conduct ongoing testing of all live IPs efficiently and cost-effectively. The cost is often the same or even less than a single manual penetration test.

Autonomous testing doesn't stop when it finds a hole in your security that could expose data. It will keep looking for other avenues to attack so you can identify and prioritize the potential vectors that an attacker could use to gain access and apply the fix before data is exposed.

Is annual penetration testing outdated? Our answer is yes. Every organization should include ongoing autonomous testing in its cybersecurity program.