Digitalisation has made many businesses adopt new technologies at an ever-increasing rate. The change to agile approaches has been central to all this, as they enable businesses to solve solutions much faster. But one area that hasn't kept up is penetration (security) testing, as it remains costly, inefficient, and complex. With a correlated rise of malicious cyberattacks, many businesses are at risk of financial and data losses that can leave severe and lasting impacts.

PTaaS (Penetration Testing as a Service) is an agile approach to security testing that allows businesses to initiate an on-demand test that effectively identifies and manages vulnerabilities. It simplifies and automates the penetration testing process to deliver timely and actionable results. There are plenty of other benefits, too, so read on to find out!

The End-User Benefits of PTaaS

Reduced costs — A traditional penetration test can cost up to $10,000 per week or more! Most of this comes from management overheads such as onboarding time, sales cycles, meetings and SoW generation, which are mostly hidden costs. Clients can save up to 30% on every penetration test with PTaaS, which is far more affordable. This is achieved through automating the process with tool integrations that take care of the backend testing tasks.

Greater control — If you’ve ever been through the pentesting process, then you know how time-consuming and complex it is. Some large organisations even have a separate resource to manage their pentest projects. Added to this are the inevitable delays that arise from resource constraints and scheduling. PTaaS enables clients to initiate a penetration test when they need it; shifting the control from the pentest company to you.

Continuous testing — As the application development progresses, application owners want to perform security testing in a continuous manner and integrate with their devops processes. With PTaaS, customers can perform a new test, retests or feature-specific tests as the application development progresses in an agile manner.

Faster turnarounds — A standard penetration test has a life cycle of 2-4 weeks, right from scoping till report delivery, if not longer. This is more than enough time for an attacker to target and exploit a vulnerability. With PTaaS, backend automation takes care of the vulnerability scanning and extracting vulnerabilities from bulky scan reports. The report generation process is generally automated too, which allows pentesters to only spend their time on actual testing.

Industry compliance — PTaaS ensures that all testing adheres to industry security standards, such as OWASP, CWE and SANS. This is achieved through human-augmented penetration testing, which uses a checklist-driven approach to ensure nothing gets missed.

Single platform delivery — A PTaaS customer is assigned a dashboard and login, which lets them manage their vulnerabilities from one place. This lets them download or view management or developer reports, request a new scan, a feature-specific scan or a retest. In short, it’s a single pane view that results in a better understanding of each asset’s security state.

Get Started With PTaaS - Blacklock Now!

Initiating a penetration test with Blacklock is easy and provides significant end-user benefits. These range from cost reductions to increased efficiency and enhanced delivery, which fits well to the agile practices.

To initiate a test, all you have to do is choose a plan, provide target details, and digitally sign an authorisation letter to get started. Then when that’s done, you can initiate an on-demand test whenever you like and let our scan engine do the heavy lifting. After the test, you’ll be able to view or download a penetration test report from your dashboard, which provides clear and actionable steps. Added to this is the option to request a new scan, a feature-specific scan or a retest at a fixed one-time price.

To begin this process, get in touch with us now!