Automated Penetration Testing for Large Enterprises: Why it Works

In large enterprise ecosystems where data flows in real-time and heavy computational workloads process massive amounts of information, security is a critical, ongoing concern. As organizations rely more and more on extensive infrastructure with frequent changes deployed into production, the need for rapid and efficient security assessments is dire – and traditional manual penetration testing is often a labor-intensive and time-consuming process.

Enterprise teams have begun shifting from being reactive to more proactive, turning to automated penetration testing as a scalable and cost-effective solution to identify and exploit vulnerabilities and potential exposures swiftly.

In this blog, we’ll explore why automated penetration testing is an excellent choice for security testing for fast-moving, large scale IT environments with heaving computing needs, and how it can help large enterprises bolster their cyber resilience efficiently.

The Demand for High-Frequency, Scalable, and Efficient Pentesting

Large enterprises rely on heavy computational workloads to process data, run applications, handle network traffic, and manage various computing resources. Enterprises need an efficient and scalable solution in place to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data in large, complex IT environments. Changes in these environments are not only constant, but there is immense pressure to accelerate release cycles as development teams race against competitors to deploy new cutting-edge features and enhancements through CI/CD practices, substantiating the need for a plausible security testing solution even further.

The fine line between speed and security can sometimes become blurred, emphasizing the critical need for robust automated penetration testing to swiftly identify, prioritize, and mitigate those vulnerabilities that pose the highest risk. Automated penetration testing enables enterprises to overcome the following core challenges that are typically encountered with more traditional security testing:

Overcoming Speed, Efficiency, and Scalability Hurdles

Our complex IT environments with heavy computational workloads are constantly generating and processing data at a rapid pace, which demands a security solution that can keep pace to identify and mitigate risk quickly and efficiently. Even in IT environments with thousands of assets, automated penetration testing can be strategically implemented to help identify and prioritize vulnerabilities and validate remediations efficiently and continuously to reduce further operational risk.

Furthermore, when changes are deployed frequently in the CI/CD pipeline, this could lead to unknown vulnerabilities in enterprise applications, leaving them exposed and at a higher risk for a cyber attack. When a security assessment isn’t conducted as soon as or before a change is implemented, this extends the window of exposure. Manual penetration testing, while highly effective for certain point-in-time testing, relies heavily on human experts or ethical hackers, hindering its ability to test assets at the frequency and speed needed to keep up with fast-paced changes in enterprise IT environments.

In summary, automated pentesting eliminates the need for costly expertise, processes, and tools by using automation to identify vulnerabilities with little to no human intervention. Automating tasks like the simulation of cyber-attacks and vulnerability reporting and prioritization provides enterprises with the speed and efficiency they need to mitigate risks proactively without limiting scalability. When vulnerabilities are identified and prioritized swiftly, security teams can address them proactively before they can be exploited, reducing operational risk.

The Pros of Automated Pentesting

1. Scalability: Automated penetration testing can handle large-scale data analyses and security tasks for large enterprises. Advanced automated penetration testing providers also embed AI technology into their solutions to take thousands of POC samples from testing and categorize true or false positives in real-time to enable greater scalability to reduce enterprise attack surfaces.

2. Consistency: By automating routine security testing tasks and the decision-making process, automated pentesting can reduce the likelihood of human error, increasing the predictability and accuracy of continuous enterprise security testing.

3. Speed and Efficiency: Automated penetration testing multiplies not only the scale, but the speed of vulnerability identification and prioritization by interpreting large data sets, historical data, and thousands of evidence-based tests to uncover patterns impossible to detect solely with manual methods.

4. AI-driven Contextual Insights: BreachLock AI technology provides deeper, more enriched contextual insights across an enterprise’s attack surface due to its ability to analyze vast amounts of data in real-time to identify complex patterns and anomalies within the most exploitable points of interest by an attacker. This evidence-based output from automated pentesting provides the context needed to assess actual risk.

Scale and Accelerate Penetration Testing with BreachLock

BreachLock’s advanced and nuanced approach to automated pentesting for enterprises accelerates security prioritization, reduces operational risk, and eliminates the need for costly expertise, processes, and tools. BreachLock automated penetration testing can exploit thousands of assets quickly and efficiently to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities to accelerate remediation. Seamlessly integrating with DevOps workflows, BreachLock fosters automated collaboration between security operations and development teams throughout the SDLC. Continuous automated pentesting enables enterprises with frequent deployments in the CI/CD pipeline to validate the security of their deployments in real time.

BreachLock’s team of experts will work with security teams from start to finish to ensure that the scope of work fits both security and business requirements with the right combination of technology, processes, and expertise. Schedule a discovery call with an expert today to get started.

About BreachLock

BreachLock is a global leader offering human-delivered, AI-powered, and automated solutions for Attack Surface Management (ASM), Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS),  Automated Pentesting (APT), and Red Teaming as a Service (RTaaS). Collectively, these solutions go beyond providing an attacker’s view of common vulnerabilities and exposures to provide enterprises with evidence-based risk across their entire attack surface to determine how they will respond to an attack.

Know Your Risk. Accelerate risk prioritization and remediation accuracy across the entire security ecosystem with BreachLock.