What Makes PTaaS Different from Traditional Penetration Testing?

4.88 million US dollars. It is the average cost of data breach globally as per reports from IBM as of 2024.

Technological development has provided a significant advantage for the development of new software and hardware solutions. It provides significant leverage to both the sides of good and bad

The frequency of data breaches had been growing faster than ever and that too in the shortest of the time possible. The challenge of facing the harsh realities in the cyber threats domain is something that companies like yours would often find harder.

For the same you would need services and resources which are always more than the primitive cyber security services.

The need for being proactive in securing your business and its assets is now a mandate from all the stakeholders, be it investors or customers and no more something you must have in extra.

PTaaS which is the short-hand for “penetration testing as a service”. This blog is all about the comparison of the same with traditional penetration testing. The intent is to help you take better proactive security decisions for ensuring threat resilience for your business.

What is Traditional Penetration Testing?

In traditional penetration testing, skilled security professionals called penetration testers conduct security evaluations upon your business assets. They include web and mobile applications, networks, APIs, physical security, social engineering, and so on. It is a systematic approach that helps your organization to find, assess, and remediate vulnerabilities through simulating real-world attacks under a controlled environment without causing much operational disruptions.

Its primary purpose is to identify security flaws before bad actors find and exploit them. This in turn prevents data breaches, system invasions, and other cyber attacks. Periodic penetration testing is also useful to test the incident response abilities and evaluate the overall security posture of your company and its assets.

Also, it is project based and follows a standard operating procedure.

It is an ongoing process till the desired level of resilience is achieved and is usually performed twice a year or annually.

The major limitations of traditional penetration testing are as follows:

Only provides the insights about your applications and assets at a specific point of time. This introduces a greater risk of higher chances of missing the immediate emerged vulnerabilities after the test.
It is intensive in the aspects of time, technical, financial, and human resources. Penetration testing demands industry experts who are highly skilled to conduct evaluation along with higher technical and financial resources.
Scaling proactive security measures such as penetration testing has its own limitations. According to cybersecurity expert opinion, it is often challenging to scale with growth and complexities of IT infrastructures of your organization.

What is PTaaS (Penetration Testing as a Service)?

$301 billion is the projected market size by 2029 of penetration testing as a service according to analysis from markets.

This is primarily driven by factors including the increase in cyber threats, stringent data protection and privacy regulations, transformation of IT infrastructure, and demand for continuous security evaluation methodologies.

PTaaS which is the short-hand for “penetration testing as a service”. It is the modern hybrid solution where the digital security services are combined and provided as a platform.

In this approach, the benefits of automated penetration testing are combined with that of manual pentesting. It is a latest model that gives higher priority to its features such as the continuous security evaluation, scalability of testing, and integration into the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Traditional penetration testing is a project based approach which provides security insights about the application in a snapshot. PTaaS majorly runs on cloud based platforms and hence it benefits your business with continuous evaluation and real time identification and remediation of vulnerabilities.

This supports your business to automate the workflows, retest the threats, gain real time insights into the current state of security posture, and ensure real-time collaboration among different departments in charge of ensuring security.

Key benefits of penetration testing as a service are as follows:

Security teams or the developers are able to conduct penetration testing whenever they are in need.
Benefits from continuous testing approach rather than snapshot testing.
Comprehensive dashboard as the single source of truth for all the vulnerabilities assessed.
Real time updates and insights about the threats, risk scores, and remediations.
Combined benefits of automated as well as manual penetration testing that helps reduce human stress and gain in-depth assessment of vulnerabilities.
Pay per vulnerability pricing model that benefits you with cost effectiveness.
Meet data security standards such as SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and ISO 27001.
Simplify audit process with the compliance ready penetration testing reports.
Step by step remediation guidance for effective fixation of threat detected.
Support for dynamic attack surfaces such as APIs, microservices and hybrid cloud environments.

Also read - What is API Penetration Testing

Differences Between PTaaS and Traditional Penetration Testing

As mentioned above, PTaaS is the modernized solution that meets your organization’s comprehensive need of ensuring security. However, there is more to it when comparing it with traditional penetration testing.

Following is a table regarding the comparison between them both.

Aspect	Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS)	Traditional Penetration Testing
Assessment Frequency	Provides ongoing and on-demand evaluations, ensuring timely detection and resolution of vulnerabilities.	Typically performed on scheduled intervals, such as annually or manually, offering a snapshot of the organization's security status at a specific moment.
Delivery Model	Combines automated evaluations with manual testing, delivering immediate insights through cloud-based platforms.	Relies on manual assessments, with detailed reports provided after the testing period, which can delay remediation efforts.
Resource Allocation	Integrates automation with human expertise, enhancing efficiency and reducing the time needed for thorough assessments.	Demands considerable manual effort and time, often resulting in higher expenses and extended assessment duration.
Cost Structure	Offers flexible pricing models, such as subscriptions or pay-per-use, making regular testing more financially accessible.	Generally involves significant upfront expenses for each testing engagement, which may be prohibitive for frequent assessments.
Integration Capability	Seamlessly integrates with DevSecOps pipelines and current security infrastructure, promoting a cohesive and efficient security posture.	Often functions independently, with limited integration into existing security tools and workflows, potentially leading to isolated operations.
Remediation Support	Delivers real-time insights and guidance, enabling immediate remediation actions and reducing response time.	Provides a static report after the assessment, which may delay remediation efforts due to the time required to analyze and act upon findings.
Scope & Coverage	Adapts to varying scope profiles, including APIs, cloud services, and microservices, ensuring comprehensive coverage.	Limited to predefined assets and tools, potentially overlooking emerging threats outside the assessment parameters.
Testing Methodology	Provides a hybrid approach, combining automated tools with manual ethical hacking to enhance thoroughness and efficiency.	Primarily depends on manual testing, which can be thorough but time-consuming and subject to human limitations.
Scalability	Designed for scalability, accommodating cloud-native applications and dynamic infrastructure with ease.	Less adaptable to rapidly changing infrastructure, making it challenging to scale in dynamic environments.
Compliance & Reporting	Provides compliance-ready reports while emphasizing actionable security insights, enhancing both regulatory standerence and enhanced security.	Focuses on meeting compliance requirements, often resulting in reports that are more compliance-driven than security-focused.
Human vs. Machine	Automates routine operations with human validation when necessary, maintaining consistency.	Heavily reliant on human penetration testers, which can lead to inconsistencies and potential oversights.

PTaaS vs. Traditional Penetration Testing: Which One is Right for Your Business?

The decision between choosing PTaaS and traditional penetration testing is determined by factors such as assessment frequency, model of delivery, allocation of resources, cost structure, integration requirements, and type of remediation support primarily.

Traditional penetration testing is the right choice if you are in need of the following:

Functioning in a strong-regulatory bound industry: Finance and healthcare businesses often are mandated to comply with the data privacy compliance requirements. If your business functions in the same, point in time and detailed security evaluations would be necessary to meet the regulatory standards.

Organizations with static environments: Periodic penetration testing might be the ideal solution if your application doesn’t undergo frequent updations. It would be sufficient for your security requirements of finding and fixing vulnerabilities.

If you need human analysis: Manual penetration is the ideal solution if you are in need of analysing complex applications and systems performed by humans. This is since, the creativity and intuition elements of ethical hackers helps you greatly to uncover intricate vulnerabilities, which automated testing approach often misses.

Also read - The Ultimate Guide to Software Penetration Testing for SaaS Companies

Penetration as a service (PTaaS) is the right choice if you are in need for:

Securing dynamic development environments: PTaaS is an excellent choice for your organization if you are in need for threat assessment which aligns with ever evolving development cycles and follows agile methodologies and continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipelines.

Optimized resource allocation: If you are in search for a cost effective penetration testing solution, the scalable model that has both the benefits of automated scanning and human expertise is the right choice. This provides you with comprehensive coverage ensuring a precise outcome from evaluation.

In need of continuous security posture: Threats landscape are evolving faster than ever before. PTaaS is the ideal solution since they deliver continuous monitoring along with live report generation. This helps you greatly to ensure faster remediation and thereby maintain a robust security posture.

To make decision making much simpler for you, follow the image on decision making tree shown below:

Penetration testing as a service flowchart

Future of Penetration Testing Services: Is PTaaS the New Standard?

Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) is becoming increasingly popular among enterprises of all sizes and sectors. It offers multiple benefits over traditional penetration testing, making it a popular choice for businesses trying to improve their security.

Traditional penetration testing may be sluggish, expensive, and unreliable. Large consulting businesses sometimes incur excessive expenses owing to increasing project scopes and relying on antiquated manual procedures.

Employees in charge of red teaming and comprehensive penetration testing struggle to generate concrete outcomes using traditional technologies that are now available.

Analysis of numerous reports on a variety of areas of threat analysis is nothing more than a big headache for these teams in traditional penetration techniques. Their scope of threat analysis involves compliance with regulations, vulnerability management, dynamic code testing, cloud security, and analysis of static code.

As per the (ISC)2 workforce research from 2023, 70% of cybersecurity professionals say their firm does not have enough cybersecurity workers.

Along with all the above, the team would require a longer test duration of weeks while facing challenges from unexpected incidents, false positive findings, and unclear and inadequate data supported instructions for resolving the flaws discovered.

PTaaS provides a more integrated and comprehensive method than typical one-time penetration testing. Traditional penetration testing would not be fast enough for agile teams to adequately detect problems with software, while delivering thousands of lines of code each day.

Choosing penetration testing as a service benefits your business in securing applications and assets with more testing time for each of the features. This helps with broader attack combination range and the insights of security experts.

As a result, PTaaS frequently finds twice as many faults per program compared to traditional penetration testing. Also, it is better suited to solve threats relating to sophisticated business logic concerns and features such as authentication, identity, and multi-tenancy.

Conclusion

Traditional penetration testing is a project-based technique that delivers security insights into the application in a single snapshot. PTaaS is mostly built on cloud platforms, which helps your organization by allowing for continuous review and real-time vulnerability discovery and mitigation.

PTaaS is more cost effective in comparison to traditional penetration testing since it is available through a subscription pricing model. It is the right choice for your organizations if you are in optimized budget allocation, need for regular evaluation, and demand higher flexibility.

It is also the ideal option in case you are interested in a real time, user friendly and actionable result dashboard in comparison to primitive PDF reports which is often harder to comprehend precisely.

Dynamic results which has an added feature of integrating with existing workflows is also yet another greater advantage of choosing penetration testing as a service.

Choosing the right PTaaS provider plays the most critical role in determining your organization’s security evaluation outcomes. The resource wealth, expertise, methodology, compliance to necessary security standards, scalability of services being provided, and ability to integrate with the existing security technologies must be the key considerations in making this decision.

Above all, their ability to deliver actionable insights and suggestions beyond simply identifying vulnerabilities is critical for long-term improvement of security posture.

This is where UprootSecurity can be your partner in ensuring watertight security for your business.

Penetration testing as a Service (PTaaS) FAQs

1. How does PTaaS differ from traditional penetration testing?

PTaaS provides ongoing assessments with added benefits from the combination of manual and automated penetration testing. In contrast, traditional penetration testing is often a one-time or periodic engagement.

2. What makes PTaaS different in identifying vulnerabilities?

Real time threat evaluation results with an actionable and insightful dashboard makes identification and remediation of vulnerabilities much faster.

3. How does PTaaS benefit in decision making?

The detailed analysis with supportive data and actionable dashboard gives both filtered and comprehensive view into the live security posture of your organization and its digital assets.