How PTaaS Can Benefit Pentest Providers?
While PTaaS is an improvement over traditional methods for organizations in every way, it also has benefits for the pentest provider. Let’s look at how PTaaS can improve your client’s and your life.
How did PTaaS become a modern solution?
Penetration-Testing-as-a-service has rapidly spread in the pentesting field, disrupting it in the process. Not only is it helping organizations better manage their security and improve it, but PTaaS has also become a powerful tool for pentest providers too as a solution allowing them to give their clients a better pentest experience.
This has resulted in the growing demand for PTaaS since it’s a win-win situation for both clients and providers. While clients prefer easier integration of the pentesting cycle into existing workflow, vendors are moving towards the cloud-based offerings of pentesting, which allows them to perform more pentests more efficiently and faster. This effectively increases the revenue stream and the quality of pentests, resulting in a feedback loop of growth.
We will pay attention to providers this time This article will focus on the pentest provider’s perspective, taking a deeper view of their perception and diving into how PTaaS is one thing that you can implement as a provider for making your services more qualified.
Pentest provider PTaaS benefits
Most pentest provider clients come in for an annual pentest. Traditional approaches can only treat them with a lack of communication between the parties leading to misunderstanding and unclear results. This turns into longer engagements, with lower quality of pentest results and client satisfaction. That’s where PTaaS comes into play to solve these issues and simplify daily pentest life.
Continuous Engagement
As the pentest provider, it’s pretty obvious that the highest priority is the client’s security. When pentests were carried out through traditional methods, obvious gaps remained in the security infrastructure as the pentests were an annual affair, leading to newer vulnerabilities remaining unpatched. But continuous pentesting ensures that pentest providers have an eagle-eye view over the customer’s security posture over a long time, leading to better mitigation of the latest 0 days and newly discovered vulnerabilities before it’s too late for the client...
Improved Pentests
PTaaS enables better management of resources, leading to the availability of a large pool of experienced security professionals. Pentesters with different specialties and certifications can be used for specific pentests depending on the type of requirements. This, alongside the use of tools for automation, data gathering, etc results in better pentests. Using PTaaS tools and gear lets you be more productive as less time is spent on routine things, and they can be delegated while you focus on more important duties.
Better Communications
Two-way, real-time communication takes place between security experts and the client side teams, replacing the trend of unwillingness to reach out to each other between developers, blue teams, red teams, etc. that were present in the older approaches to pentests. This free-flowing communication helps the security testers understand how things work, what is expected from testers, and many other things that improve the process. This also results in building more trust with clients.
Better Scalability
As PTaaS puts a cloud-based spin on pentesting services, the ease of scalability increases from a vendor's perspective. The number of clients you can accommodate can easily be handled due to the use of PTaaS gears that provide a centralized management platform without additional resources. And while cloud-based PTaaS is one approach, opting for on-premise solutions can result in data being more secure (solutions like Hive and Apiary).
Effective Cost Expenditure
Due to the reuse of tools, applications, and infrastructure, the providers can increase their return-to-expenditure ratio. This leads to more revenue as existing services get used by multiple clients without much additional cost for each pentest. This effectively allows the revenue to grow without additional implementation expenses, and a better-managed refined workflow indicates a reduction in total man hours, ultimately reducing spending.
Streamlining the Pentest Process
Combining all of the benefits of PTaaS that a provider gets results in a pentest process or lifecycle that is far more streamlined & effective than traditional processes.
Standardizing Methodologies
PTaaS allows providers to introduce standardization into the processes, workflows, tools, etc they use to perform pentests. This leads to a more coherent testing process and prevents overlooking important parts of testing that might get missed sometimes, resulting in fewer errors and better reports in the end.
Centralized Management
Due to the nature of the implementation of PTaaS, the platform that is built to provide the PTaaS services lets you consolidate all the information, projects, data, etc in one place. Tools like Hexway’s Hive allow a way to centralize knowledge related to all the engagement in a single, easy-to-manage place. Coupled with Hexway Apiary, this information can be shared with clients, providing them with real-time updates on their product and found vulnerabilities.
How PTaaS increases efficiency and productivity
The end goal of implementing PTaaS is to boost your efficiency and productivity. Streamlining the pentest process basically stands for efficiency. When standardization is introduced, time spent in decision-making is reduced. Further, routine and/or laborious things can be offloaded to automation tools, providing more time for harder manual aspects of pentest. This creates a workflow that can easily be integrated into clients' already existing software development life cycle.
Further, by making sure everything is being managed in a single place, the additional overhead of managing and tracking every project decreases. Continuing the example of Hive, keeping a status check on deadlines (SLA), and project objectives becomes super easy. It also helps in reporting by letting you import and structure any kind of data. Visualization dashboards and stats are provided for a quick overview of how things are running. Creating issues/bugs and attaching your comments lets you make sure that you do not miss anything, and with the reverse Jira integration, the status of these issues can be tracked in real-time from the tester end to the customer and vice versa.
Successful PTaaS implementations by pentest providers
We will now look at some examples of how PTaaS has been implemented in the real world:
Cobalt was one of the pioneers in this field, offering crowdfunded security that matches freelance pentesters with clients' specific needs. They provide a flexible and scalable testing solution with a user-friendly online platform.
HackerOne is another PTaaS provider with a global network of pentesters and hackers who specialize in various security fields. Their PTaaS service offers continuous testing, automation, and retesting.
Hexway Hive & Apiary is another player in this game that helps organizations implement PTaaS. Hive is a tool for pentesters that allows collaboration and collation of all your findings in one place, while Apiary is for clients, blue teamers, and developers. Together, they provide real-time improvement of security posture.
Why PTaaS?
The vendor landscape is as ruthless and aggressive as today’s attackers are. In order to keep up with the latest trends, if you are a pentest provider, implementing a pentest-as-a-service model should be one of your top priorities.
No matter how big or small of a provider you are, PTaaS has massive promising benefits ranging from the ability to onboard more clients and do this quickly to providing them services that are quick to deploy and can be scaled on demand. PTaaS has the necessary features that will let you simplify and modernize your pentest methodology into something that employs the use of automation technologies, CI/CD pipelines, and the latest PTaaS gear and results in revenue, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Hexway’s Hive and Apiary are such PTaaS gear that can help you kickstart your PTaaS service today. Do check out the online demo, or you can also download a self-hosted version!
