Why PTaaS is Gaining Momentum Over Traditional Pentesting

Cybercriminals’ tactics are becoming increasingly creative with more powerful technology than ever at their disposal. Consequently, the threat landscape is evolving rapidly, making it critical for organizations to test and fortify their defenses more proactively, frequently, and continuously to stay ahead of new exposures. Penetration testing has been a cornerstone of cybersecurity for decades, allowing organizations to proactively test their applications and systems for security vulnerabilities and reduce risk, but manual pentesting alone is no match for the dynamic nature of modern digital environments that demand faster, more scalable, and more frequent testing. As organizations scale digitally, traditional pentesting is slowly starting to become obsolete in comparison to penetration testing as a service (PTaaS) out of pure necessity for its speed, flexibility, and scalability.

New research from Gartner in the ‘Gartner Innovation Insight: Penetration Testing as a Service’ report, which features BreachLock as a representative PTaaS provider, states, “By 2026, organizations leveraging PTaaS will perform up to 10 times more frequent pentesting and enable two times faster remediation than organizations adopting manual pentesting.” In this blog, we’ll explore what PTaaS is, traditional pentesting vs. PTaaS, the benefits of PTaaS, and more.

What is Traditional Penetration Testing?

Penetration testing has been widely adopted by organizations to assess their security posture and test their defenses proactively, and in some cases, is explicitly mandated by regulatory bodies like the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) to meet compliance. Traditional or manual pentesting is typically conducted by a team of human pentesters or ethical hackers who manually simulate cyber-attacks on an organization’s system to expose potential security weaknesses. Once testing is complete, the pentesters share the security vulnerabilities with the organization in a comprehensive report, which is typically delivered in PDF, Excel, or PDF format. Security professionals leverage the insights from the pentesting report to remediate vulnerabilities in their systems, improve their security posture, and prevent breaches.

Traditional pentesting is a point-in-time exercise, offering a snapshot of a system’s security posture, meaning that it lacks continuity and fails to consider any newly emerging vulnerabilities. Manual pentesting, as mentioned prior, comes with inherent challenges due to its dependence on humans – it’s time-consuming, expensive, and results can often be inconsistent due to varying levels of skill and certifications. While effective enough for an annual pentest in an environment with infrequent changes, the dynamic nature of modern digital environments demands a faster, more scalable, flexible, and continuous approach to identifying, prioritizing, and reducing risk, which can be achieved with PTaaS.

What is PTaaS?

Pentesting as a Service is a modern, hybrid approach to penetration testing that combines automation with manual, human-delivered pentesting, and in some cases, AI to enable both point-in-time and continuous testing. With PTaaS, pentesting results are continuously populated into a SaaS platform in real time where they are prioritized for remediation based on risk, helping the organization remediate risk more effectively and amplifying the advantages of manual pen testing with increased timeliness with exposure and risk discovery, real-time collaboration and results visibility, and more. Many PTaaS providers offer additional helpful features within their platforms like SDLC integrations, automated workflows, retesting of findings, and more, varying across different vendors.

While automated scanners can run continuously in the background to discover security vulnerabilities in real time, human pentesters manually pentest specific areas of a system that could be impacted most in the event of a breach. PTaaS gives organizations a way to continuously identify vulnerabilities in their systems and applications, prioritize remediation efforts, and improve their overall security posture more effectively, which is why it has gained rapid adoption in recent years. Overall, it is fast, accurate, scalable, and flexible enough to keep up with the testing demands of modern digital environments.

How Gartner Differentiates Between Traditional Pentesting and PTaaS

In the ‘Gartner Innovation Insight: Penetration Testing as a Service’ report, Gartner differentiates between traditional pentesting and PTaaS in terms of six variables:

• Scoping
• Delivery
• Additional Services Offered
• Integrations
• Reporting
• Pricing

The scoping process of traditional penetration testing is primarily conducted based on custom requirements gathered for unique projects. Providers typically deliver quotes as a statement of work (SOW) that outlines the project in great detail. Since pricing is project-based and highly specific, it often takes weeks to receive a SOW from a provider. During a traditional pentest itself, pentesters use both manual and automated techniques, which is conducted both on-site and remotely depending on an organization’s requirements. It’s common for traditional penetration testing providers to offer additional services like social engineering, supply chain security testing, red teaming exercises, and more. Where traditional penetration testing providers fall especially short in comparison to PTaaS providers is in their lack of integrations into external workflows, adding a significant amount of manual work to the table for data migration and limiting collaboration both internally and cross-organizationally. Findings are reported in standard document formats like PDFs, excel spreadsheets, or CSVs with no insight into findings until the report is delivered at the end of a project.

The scoping process for PTaaS differs from traditional penetration testing in that it is most commonly offered as a package with pre-defined scopes to test a set amount of assets for a set price. For example, a penetration testing provider may offer a package that allows an organization to test a web application with up to 150 pages and a set amount of user roles for a constant price. Since the pricing is highly standardized, security leaders will often receive a quote instantly, and in every case, much quicker than they would from a traditional pentesting provider for a project-based engagement. Since PTaaS is delivered through a SaaS portal 100% remotely by a combination of human experts, automation, and in some cases, AI, subscription-based pricing is common.

Many PTaaS providers offer an extensive suite of additional services through their SaaS platforms like device and discovery services, vulnerability assessments, external attack surface management (EASM), and breach and attack simulation (BAS). Pentesting as a service providers are much stronger in their ability to integrate with external SDLC workflows for DevSecOps, making it a more user-friendly approach to discovering and remediating risk. Many offer their own proprietary tools and workflows directly within their SaaS platforms, like re-testing, prioritization, and more. Delivering pentesting as a service through a SaaS portal facilitates real-time collaboration with pentesters, developers, and internal teams. Findings are delivered via a client web portal that offers real-time views into ongoing testing, offering mid-testing insights without the wait for a final report. PTaaS providers also prioritize vulnerability findings for clients to make remediation more efficient. Overall, PTaaS is much more dynamic, flexible, and scalable than traditional pentesting.

Why Choose PTaaS Over Traditional Pentesting?

Penetration Testing as a Service is becoming increasingly popular among organizations of all sizes and industries. PTaaS offers several advantages over traditional penetration testing, which may make it a more attractive option for organizations looking to improve their security posture. Here are the three core benefits of choosing PTaaS over traditional penetration testing according to Gartner:

1. Cost-effectiveness: PTaaS is typically offered on a subscription-based pricing model, which can be more cost-effective than traditional penetration testing, which is often project-based. This can be especially beneficial for organizations with limited budgets or those that require frequent testing and more flexibility.
2. Prioritization of Risks: Gartner points out that PTaaS vendors generally take a risk-based approach to reporting pentesting results by prioritizing exposures for remediation based on the risk they pose to the organization. Risk is determined based on the asset’s visibility and accessibility, attractiveness of the asset, how important it is to the business, and the risk score of the threat itself.
3. Improved Results Mobilization: The PDF reports offered by project-based penetration testing providers are not very mobile, prolonging the exposure window for organizations during pentesting with no real-time visibility of findings. Because reports are static and risks aren’t generally prioritized with no remediation guidance, clients have to manually determine which risks to prioritize and how to remediate them themselves. PTaaS helps mobilize results by offering real-time visibility of findings in a SaaS portal that integrates with external ticketing systems to facilitate faster remediation with actionable insights. PTaaS customers and developers can also collaborate with pentesters in real time to seek guidance on findings and save time from sorting through false positives that they’d receive from DAST/SAST scanners.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader in PTaaS and penetration testing services offering human-delivered, AI-powered solutions integrated into one seamless platform and a standardized, built-in framework that enables consistent and regular benchmarks of unique attacks, Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs), security controls, and processes to deliver enhanced predictability, consistency, and more accurate results in real-time, every time.