As for this world, cybersecurity is the backbone without its presence technology is useless even if it offers a great deal for businesses. Something that can not be compromised at any cost. Something that an organization must have a strong grip on. Why? Because cyber crimes have become common as technology becomes common. It is vital for organizations to pay significant attention to the utmost need for security in order to be more competitive in the market. As more and more businesses are digitizing their operations, often organizations underestimate the need for security measures for their digital products. Plenty of risks are involved then in which the exploitation of vulnerabilities by the hackers is the prominent one. The probability of having full control over your information technology infrastructure is then high.
This lack of attention to the security breaches may lead an organization even small, medium, or large organizations, to face heavy financial costs. To alleviate the risk of security incidents and avoid the cost of cyber attacks, we need to be able to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from such attacks. Here comes the role-play of penetration testers. Many penetration testing companies are playing an inevitable part to help companies prevent against cyber threats, this has enabled organizations to not invest their valuable efforts in training their in-house team of testers to act as a pentester.
Now let us take you in-depth about the importance of penetration testing for business growth;
Assessing risk
To what extent your business worth today? Is information technology infrastructure critical to your business? To what extent you will have to bear costs if the IT infrastructure does not work appropriately one day? Above all, this exercise of asking these questions is a risk assessment of your business. It is helpful in exposing you with a list of risks you are facing and their impact on your business operations. It depends upon you if you want to conduct this assessment on your own or wanna hire some expert services. The results of these risk assessment exercises will provide you an understanding of the goals and objectives that must be on the top of your priority list and that must be achieved to ensure the security and safety of an overall organization. Depending on the likelihood and impact of the threat, penetration testing can be one of the most important goals.
Compliance and regulations
During the risk assessment, if you do not perform penetration testing on the product, you will assess the impact of non-compliance with certain laws and regulations. Failure to comply with regulations may result in huge fines, loss of business license, and even imprisonment. It is important that you consult a legal counsel to evaluate local laws and regulations and ensure that your company complies with these regulations. Data privacy is receiving more and more attention. Regulators from various parts of the world are implementing strict data privacy laws to protect their citizens.
As long as the targeted customers of your company live in the same country, the company may be required to comply with these privacy laws. Even though penetration testing may not directly address data privacy issues, it can help reduce the risk of data leakage caused by software vulnerabilities.
Goodwill/reputation
After a data breach occurs and is publicly announced, your company’s reputation will certainly be damaged. This may lead to a loss of customer confidence and result in lower revenue and profits. Your company’s stock price will also be affected, as investors may be concerned about the above impact. As people gradually understand data privacy and its impact on privacy, the impact of data leakage will increase greatly, which may cause significant losses to the company.
Rivalry
Losing the company’s proprietary data will be catastrophic, especially if the data is in the hands of competitor companies. Although your competitors may not be competitors who attack you online, they can indirectly obtain this data. Your competitor may have this information in one of two possible ways, and you may never know. This can be traced back to a risk assessment to identify threats to proprietary data and their impact on the business.
Conclusion
Penetration testing is no doubt one of the best approaches to tackle the security breaches that your business may face. That’s why good security practices must be followed to keep your business operations safe and secure. By adopting a risk-based cybersecurity approach, you will address priority threats and continuously review your business risks.
