The growing reliance on digital to build resilience into business comes with a caveat: Your threat surface will grow offering new opportunities to black hats, malicious insiders, veteran hackers, weekend crackers, and even low-level script kiddies to break into your systems. Testing your IT (Information Technology) estate for vulnerabilities and continuous threat detection has therefore become just as important as investing in the right solutions to improve your security posture. Worldwide, cybercrimes have been estimated to cost US $6 trillion in 2021 (Compared to US $3 trillion in 2015) and are forecasted to hit US $10.5 trillion annually by 2025 along with untold loss of data, productivity, reputation, and business. Your organization does not want to be part of that statistic.
However, investing in security is a frustratingly difficult business. In a fast-changing technological landscape, new threats, vulnerabilities, and exploits emerge quickly. Current solutions may not always be able to identify and neutralize those threats. With the growing trend of Work from Anywhere (WFX), a remote workforce heightens the potential risk, resulting in an increased need for security surveillance and enhancement. Continuous and point-in-time penetration tests for web and mobile applications, networks, infrastructure, and end-point devices are the answer. It is not surprising, therefore, to see forecasts which suggest the penetration testing market will double from US $1.6 billion in 2021 to US $3 billion in 2026.
Most organizations will choose Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) because it allows them to leverage sophisticated tools, complex models, and experienced talent that in-house security teams are not always privileged to have. Instead, by using a PTaaS provider the service can be performed anytime, 24X7, at the push of a button, resulting in a tailor-made test. The outcome: A comprehensive report uncovering vulnerabilities, education opportunities, discussions with our lead penetration testers and the provision of remediation plans and discussions that lead to security maturity.
Security breaches can result from several factors ranging from broken authentication to the inability to keep pace with patch installation, subpar application and network configuration, and lack of encryption. To understand the nuances of each takes experience. This is where an organization like Altimetrik steps in. Using its experience of working with global customers, Altimetrik can benchmark an organization’s security processes, understand its maturity, identify hardware and software issues, and provide insights. As the security team at Altimetrik is fond of saying, “We have vulnerabilities for breakfast!” It is critical to think like a hacker and be able to leverage commercial exploits and techniques in a reversible manner, leaving no trace in a customer’s network.
Our teams, made up of locally available talent (which means we are available where you are), are equipped to assist customers build a Security Maturity Matrix that identifies gaps in security and helps move the customer towards best-of-breed solutions. As an additional service, our experienced engineers provide tailored security training to the customer’s developers to think like hackers so that security is embedded in the development process itself.
PTaaS from Altimetrik is designed to serve organizations that do not have the budgets to maintain a full-time security team but do not want to compromise on their security—plus they want the freedom to access the service based on their schedules. There is not a simpler way of achieving those goals than PTaaS from Altimetrik.
The article has been authored by Aladdin Elston, Head of Information Security, Altimetrik