This four-part guide will help security and IT leaders make a clear, informed decision and ensure they are getting the most value out of their partnership.

The Challenge

Choosing the right penetration testing partner for your organization is an imperative security decision, one that could cost considerable budget, time, and resources if not chosen wisely. It can be a challenging decision given there are hundreds of providers vying for your business, all of which offer varying levels of service, testing methodologies, and use different technologies to perform penetration tests.

Why does my organization need a penetration test?

There are many reasons organizations seek out a penetration test, however, the decision to perform a pentest on your ( below ) depends on your business goals.

  • applications
  • network
  • cloud
  • AI / LLM
  • hardware
  • physical security

According to Gartner, one of the key challenges in choosing the best pentesting company is:

  • "Many buyers of pentesting services fail to define their goals and needs prior to engaging with a provider, resulting in engagement outcomes failing to deliver against expectations"

“Prior to deciding which provider to partner with, it is important to understand the reasons why you are pursuing the pentest in the first place.”

9 reasons why organizations partner with third parties for penetration testing

  • To deliver secure software for less money:
    Security gaps remediated earlier in the software development life cycle (SDLC) cost less to fix than problems found later. Despite best efforts, security vulnerabilities slip through standard software testing processes.
  • To avoid breaches
    Discover vulnerabilities and exposures proactively to remediate them and prevent an attack — and avoid the costs of downtime and clean-up resulting from a breach. In addition, preserve the organization’s good reputation and protect relationships with business partners and customers.
  • To think like an adversary
    Only a penetration tester or a malicious attacker can chain together seemingly low-risk events to verify which vulnerabilities enable unauthorized control. Understanding and validating the implications of vulnerability scanner results to a specific application or organization requires human insight. Manual testers also identify business logic vulnerabilities that tools, but malicious hackers don’t.
  • To evaluate the effectiveness of security controls
    Learn if your security controls are working ( or not ) with a penetration test.
  • To demonstrate business impact
    Penetration testing clarifies the business impact of inaction. Understanding the business impact of each vulnerability helps justify security spand and improve decision-making.
  • To achieve compliance
    Meet security testing requirements from relevant regulatory bodies. Penetration testing is required to evaluate cybersecurity efforts and achieve compliance with regulations, such as the payment card industry (PCI) security standard or HIPAA. Other organizations may require penetration tests to comply with specific infosec management standards, including the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Center for Internet Security (CIS).
  • To eliminate false positives
    Automated scans often result in a seemingly endless list of vulnerabilities, but not all are valid. Introducing manual testers to validate the real, business-critical vulnerabilities helps an organization avoid spinning its wheels dealing with inaccurate or incomplete vulnerability assessment data.
  • To focus remediation efforts
    Prioritize remediation for the most important vulnerabilities and receive helpful guidance from your third-party testing team, such as how to remediate specific vulnerabilities and instructions for how to reproduce each vulnerability.
  • To augment the security team
    A fresh set of eyes from third-party security experts can help strengthen an organization’s vulnerability management program and validate its ability to protect the business from cyberattacks. Hiring a penetration testing partner that can serve as an extension of your team also gives valuable time back to your security teams to focus on remediation.

Pentesting use cases that are often overlooked

At the most basic level, the goal of a traditional penetration test is to uncover vulnerabilities that are potentially exploitable by cyber adversaries. For a pentester, this is the main objective, but penetration testing has evolved over the years and so have its cases. Five ways your penetration testing provider can add value to your vulnerability management program beyond discovering vulnerabilities:

  1. Save Time
  2. Remediation
  3. Track Progress
  4. Mature Program
  5. Communication

Reduce time spent on vulnerability management administrative tasks

Penetration testing and automation go hand in hand. Automating mundane vulnerability management tasks, such as report generation, ticketing integrations, deduplication, and vulnerability correlation, will save your security team valuable time and resources. Notably, ticketing integrations, with systems like Jira or Service Now, eliminates an extra step in the vulnerability remediation process.

Track progress of your vulnerability management program

There are benefits to working with a single pentest company over time. One key benefit to seek out is the ability to track the status of your vulnerability management program over time. Benchmarking the progress of your vulnerability management efforts is a tangible, data-driven solution to communication security program ROI.

Remediation Instructions recommendations and replication

You’ve received a list of your vulnerabilities – now what? Without guidance provided by the testers who discovered the vulnerability, assigned remediators are left in the dark. To better support your remediators, look for a penetration testing partner that provides clear instructions for remediation with every vulnerability.

Mature security program Your guide to a program management

A penetration testing company’s role should not end after the final vulnerability report is shared. Look to your penetration testing team for guidance on how to mature your security program.

Communicating results to various stakeholders Communication is a common challenge across security assessments.

Communicating the results of a penetration test to an audience that may not have a deep technical understanding, the c-suite for example, has proven difficult. Pentesting companies consistently communicate with multiple stakeholders across many technical levels and should be able to help you identify the metrics that matter to each audience and educate them on the business impact of any given vulnerability if it goes un-remediated.

4 Criteria for Evaluating Pentesting Vendors

Today, businesses find that the pentesting industry is made up of a lot of providers offering vulnerability management services. But does that mean all penetration testing services offer the same results? Simply stated, the answer is no. To help organizations choose the right team for their pentesting and vulnerability management programs, consider the following four paradoxical criteria that should help CISOs, security leaders, among others select a top penetration testing partner.

1 ) Pentesting should be agile yet consistent over time

It’s important to hire a talented penetration testing team – one that’s able to look at the environment through the eyes of an attacker and bring their insights of technical risk to the table as the environment and technology become more complex over time. A pentesting team needs to be agile to continuously improve and evolve to meet the ever-changing and elevated risk and complexities that your business may face. While evaluating agility, it is important to also look at consistency. Does your potential pentesting partner have a team orientation versus an individual or outsourced consultant. Who owns the knowledge? What if that individual moves on to a new role? You shouldn’t consider a white hat tester who acts alone. Rather, choose a pentesting team built around a consistent delivery of quality, service, and results, that can be an extension of your internal team and will bring you the foundational support you need in your vulnerability management program.

3 ) The pentesting process should be custom yet standard

With 640 terabytes of data tripping around the globe every minute, is it possible to put standards around your vulnerability management program? It’s not only possible, it is a necessity. Who you get doesn’t have to be what you get, as people so often think. From project management workflows and practitioner guides to standardized pentest checklists and testing playbooks, ensure formalized quality assurance and oversight to receive consistent results, no matter who your assigned security consultants are.

Understanding that no organization is the same, there may be some commonalities between industries, such as similar regulatory bodies to comply with, for example. This allows pentesters to put some standardization into their process while allowing for customization and flexibility that is unique to the client environment from a business or technical perspective.

2 ) A focus on internal R&D will strengthen the entire security community

Being able to collaborate with a team is critical in our client relationships. Why dedicate so much time to continued education and mentorship? Pentesters are consistently asked to be forward-thinking and penetration test increasingly complex environments. Training and collaboration are key to helping grow and scale pentesting talent to meet the industry’s evolving needs. Collaboration and innovation are key to evolving as an enterprise and as an industry. Pentesters are intensely creative and have highly curious technical minds. The effort a pentest company places in research and development should be shared with the broader security community. Penetration testing services are the same by definition, but none are created equal. When hiring a penetration testing company to test your applications, cloud, network, or perform a red team, consider pentesting talent, processes, technology, and culture to ensure you’re getting the most value out of your partnership.

4 ) Technology should be automated to increase manual pentesting

Automated scanning is foundational to any penetration testing program. It’s how an organization handles the thousands of results from those scans that is critical – as there will be duplicates, false positives, and many, many data points, oftentimes delivered in spreadsheets or PDFs. Your internal security/IT team is then tasked with sifting through, sorting, and evaluating that data. Is that administrative work the best use of their time? Focus your internal team on finding solutions for effective and fast vulnerability remediation, rather than spending their time heads down in administrative tasks. It’s up to your pentesting team to identify and communicate the priority vulnerabilities, not hand you a document and wish you luck. Look for a penetration testing provider who has tools in place to automate pentest reporting functions and deliver results that can be easily sorted and acted upon so that the majority of human capital investment is focused on finding business logic vulnerabilities that tools cannot.

Human Driven

  • 350+ pentesters
  • Employed, not outsourced
  • Wide domain expertise

AI-Enabled

  • Consistent quality
  • Deep visibility
  • Transparent results

Modern Pentesting

  • Use case driven
  • Friction-free
  • Built for today’s threats