What is Penetration Testing: Purpose & Advantages To Know

09 January 2025

Most organisations would probably believe they are already secure enough to prevent the increasing number of breaches. However, this has turned out to be totally opposite. If it was really the case, how could so many businesses lose their data and money, after all? So, instead of waiting for the attacks to happen, it’s best to find out your weaknesses and improve them. And there’d not be any more effective way to do this than conducting penetration testing, breaking into your own system and uncovering weak points. Penetration testing can have several advantages, most importantly, it helps ensure your organisation is pre-equipped with the necessary tools and measures to tackle real-life attacks.

What is Penetration Testing

Penetration testing is a safe and effective method to conduct cyberattack on your own system or network, finding out whether they have strong security measures or not. However, penetration testing’s main role is to help find what weak points are and fix them before real hackers can exploit them. Also, this can help your it helpdesk support team in maintaining secure operations.

Comparatively, this is a more proactive way to protect your organisation data and stay ahead of potential threats. It is a cybersecurity approach, using ethical hacking to identify vulnerabilities in systems and networks. It is also called as “pen testing.” It helps find out certain points that are weak, operational issues, and potential risks from various cyber threats.

Moreover, these tests simulate both internal as well as external attacks on different access points, whether on-site or remote. Based on these analysis, detailed reports are created later to share the findings, including ways to improve the weaknesses.

Furthermore, businesses had to face more than 7 million cybercrimes, in just 2024, showing how ignorant most of these organisations are, especially in terms of online protection and having well-managed cyber security services.

Penetration Testing: Exploring the Benefits

Pen testing comes with a number of benefits. Above all, it helps ensure business continuity and find out potential gaps that could have an impact on your overall operations. These things can also help guide your it helpdesk support team, in case you have, working on vulnerabilities efficiently.

Role of a Penetration Tester

So, what does a penetration tester do exactly? To put it simply, penetration testers play a crucial role in strengthening cybersecurity, doing online attacks on your company’s systems that’d be similar to real hacking. Moreover, this can also help it helpdesk support providers, ensuring fast resolution as well as better security.

During the process, a pen tester can help you carefully note down each step and provide a detailed report outlining their methods and the success of their attempts to bypass security measures. In addition, you can seek high-quality managed cyber security services to enhance your organisation’s protection.

Penetration Tests – Understanding What Exactly are They

However, it might be wrong to assume that your organisation’s network is safe, especially as you’d have invested in expensive tools and always keep your systems up-to-date. Beyond just revealing potential weak spots, penetration is an efficient approach towards improving business operations, and building the defence measures strong enough to prevent real-life attacks.

Furthermore, several types of tests are available, each with a different objectives and scope. This includes social engineering, networks, web applications, IoT, cloud and database testing. Moreover, to conduct them, tools such as Nmap, Metasploit, Burp Suite Professional, etc., can be used, helping effectively complete the tests.

What’s Their Purpose, Anyway?

Ultimately, the question comes to why do we even need to do this? What is the purpose of penetration testing? Experts, including the national cyber security centre, suggest that penetration is comparatively an effective technique for conducting cyberattack similar to the real-life.

In order to know what flaws your organisation network or system has, this method can be best. It is also considered as an ethical method of hacking as it helps improve your safety measures.

Therefore, when businesses face an attack on their networks, they then respond by making an incident response team to analyse the issue and work on them actively. However, by using penetration testing and security scanners, organisations can address vulnerabilities before they are exploited by attackers.

Moreover, establishing an effective penetration testing program helps close this gap, enhancing your overall safety and reducing the need to over rely on third parties, such as managed cyber security services providers.

Conclusion

As a crucial tool, conducting penetration testing can be helpful in strengthening cybersecurity, and uncovering vulnerabilities before attackers can use them and break into your computer systems. Simulating real-world situations, it will eventually empower your organisation to protect data, ensure compliance, and maintain the trust of customers. So, using this proactive approach will not only make your system strong but also make your business operations efficient and smooth.