How Important is Penetration Testing to Network Security

Penetration testing can create wonders for upcoming enterprises if they come up with the right solution according to the demands and blend them with the automated testing method for security expert analysis.

Penetration testing services is not just about jumping into the network security by running different steps at random, but it is about creating an organized, step by step plan that details on what, when, and how exactly are you going to do things.
How Important is Penetration Testing?
Penetration testing is an essential process that needs to be performed on a regular basis in every organization to secure the network system. Penetration testing is of different types, which include:

• Network Penetration Testing
• Application Penetration Testing
• Wireless Penetration Testing
• Infrastructure Penetration Testing

But the main problem is that many of us will have a misconception that once penetration testing is done, their systems are safe forever. Such people will never get the real benefits of this process until they follow the method regularly and will practically have to face disappointing outcomes in the future.
The need for conducting a penetration test varies according to businesses as they all work in a different way. However, the question is, what are the main benefits that a company gets from penetration testing and here we have listed a few:

1. Manage the Risk Factors

One of the most important benefits of pen testing or penetration testing is that it will provide you the baseline to work with the risk factors in a structured and optimal way. In this testing, the number of vulnerabilities is listed out, which is found in the target environment and also the risk factors associated with it. At first, the sequence with the highest risk is tackled and then followed to the lower ones.

2. Increase the Business Continuity

Business continuity is the main aim for every organization and any hurdles to this can cause a huge loss to the entire company. A breakdown in business continuity can be due to many reasons and lack of security loopholes can be one of them.
If your systems are insecure, then it might suffer more breaches. It is always important to set a stronger encryption to avoid MITM (Man In The Middle) attacks. This is because, even hackers are hired today by the rivals to stop business continuity by exploiting the vulnerabilities of the competitors to gain access to their network and also create a denial of service condition, which causes a crash in the working of the company.
3. Evaluate Security Investment
Penetration testing provides an opportunity to know about the current situation of a company and analyse the existing potential breach points. It gives us a clear idea about the entire security system and helps us to ensure whether the configuration system management has been followed properly within the company.
Such type of testing methods helps to evaluate the security investments, that is the total investment required to secure the entire network systems, what is needed, what works properly, and what does not work properly.
4. Protect your Clients, Projects or Third Parties
A vulnerability that attacks a company not only causes problems to themselves, but also to their clients, third parties and even the projects a company is handling with. However, if a company performs penetration testing regularly and takes necessary actions for security, then it will help others to have trust and confidence in that organization.

5. Guard Reputation of the Company and Maintain Public Relationships
A good public relationship and reputation are built by a company through years of struggle, regular hard work, and a large amount of investment. Even a small security issue or vulnerability attack can cause major damage to their reputation in public.
6. Help any sort of Financial Damage and avoid Fines
Simple unnoticed breaches can cause a great loss to the financial support of the company and systematic penetration testing can help you protect your organizations. Such testing keeps the major activities updated within the auditing system, which can avoid fines in the future.
7. Helps to keep a Check on Cyber Defence Capability
During the process of penetration testing, the target company should be able to identify multiple attacks and should be able to respond accordingly. The effectiveness of the protected devices like IDS, WAF or IPS can also be checked during penetration testing.
8. Performed after Deployment of New Infrastructure & Application
Pen testing should be certainly performed in companies after the deployment of a new infrastructure and application, like updating of the firmware, changes in the firewall rule, patches and upgrades to software. Because once changes happens in software performance testing, it’s easy for breaches to occur, so it is always better to keep the network secured.
9. Gap Analysis Maintenance
Pen testing/penetration testing is not a one time event, instead it should be a continual process that measures how well the entire security system performs. It also helps companies to gain awareness on gaps if any, in the system at a given point of time.
Penetration testing is necessary for any businesses that wants their network to be secure and operations to continue without any service disruption. With high-profile data vulnerabilities continuing to dominate, methods for enterprise cyber security have started to change. If you fail to test the network security and environment prior to use, it might be impossible to ensure complete security. And this is why penetration testing makes sense for organisations of all sizes.