Why Penetration Testing Is So Important for Your Business

The vast majority of businesses with any sort of online presence or electronic network are waking up to the urgency of maintaining security in cyberspace. Abilities developed by hackers in recent years have even put small-medium-size business in their scopes, even if the cyber stories you hear about in the media focus on high-profile companies and government institutions being targeted.

While some sophisticated hackers focus their efforts on larger companies and institutions to make a social statement or just to cause disruption on the largest scale possible, others go for easier prey: smaller entities with less protection. For these smaller businesses, the disruption caused by a cyberattack can be just as damaging, if not more than for large entities.

That means everyone needs to keep their systems safe. Profits and customers are at stake and just one successful attack could set you back months while you scramble in damage-control mode. And the best tool businesses have to defend themselves is to preempt attackers with penetration testing.

Penetration tests safely simulate a gauntlet of different attacks on your networks and online connections with the goal of finding security flaws before any hackers have the opportunity to take advantage of them and cause you harm.

Reviewing Your Code Just Doesn’t Cut It

But why penetration testing? What makes this method so effective at keeping you protected? Penetration tests bring several advantages and benefits to the table. The bottom line is that reviewing your code visually to try and spot vulnerabilities just doesn’t cut it. Reviewing code this way is notoriously difficult and long lines of code interacting with one another can behave in unpredicted ways, leaving hidden back doors unlocked to attackers.

Penetration testing gives you the ability to get in the mind of the hackers and think like they do. When the military draws up war plans and formulates strategies, they simulate the whole thing with massive exercises. Some of the troops play the part of the enemy and a full-blown simulation is enacted while every possible scenario is considered and acted out so the generals know best how to prepare themselves. The same is true of penetration testing.

Without careful penetration testing, you leave your business open to any attackers with the ability to locate and take advantage of vulnerabilities in your systems. That could mean losing customer data and therefore public trust; you could have technology or even money stolen right from under your nose; and the network your computers rely on could be brought to a complete standstill along with your business operations.

In any of these scenarios, you face major setbacks that could be very difficult to recover from. Penetration testing is all about putting you ahead of the threats you face and making sure you can continue to prosper free of worry.