In the ever-changing world of cybersecurity, we often hear about new hacks and new attacks. The defensive side of cybersecurity is always changing as well, and one of the newer options is PTaaS, or Penetration Testing as a Service.
As the industry struggles to define PTaaS, it can be very confusing for organizations that are looking to stay up-to-date and secure. In this blog we’ll discuss what PTaaS is and talk about the current flavors of PTaaS to help you make the most informed decision.
What is PTaaS?
Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) is a modern and agile approach to cybersecurity that combines automated tools with human expertise to provide continuous, on-demand security assessments. It allows organizations to identify and address vulnerabilities in real-time, ensuring robust protection against evolving cyber threats.
Organizations can integrate PTaaS into their business processes – including the SDLC for web applications – offering flexibility, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to adapt to dynamic security risks. As organizations work to combat threat actors using constantly shifting attacks, PTaaS offers a continual approach to discovering exploitable vulnerabilities in order to remediate them quickly. This makes PTaaS an essential tool for maintaining a strong security posture in today’s digital landscape.
Is PTaaS Just Scans?
This is where PTaaS becomes confusing. One of our sales team’s biggest struggles is making it clear that a penetration test is not just a vulnerability scan. Some pentest companies try to pass vuln scans as penetration tests for much lower prices, but that leaves organizations with very limited information that ignores manual exploits such as chained attacks. Companies may use those tests to check the box for compliance, but they miss the spirit of the requirements and shortchange their customers.
Some PTaaS vendors have taken scans a step further and built fully automated PTaaS systems that combine vuln scanners with automated exploit tools but stop there. If your search for a PTaaS service finds options at a fraction of the price of other services, such as our PTaaS service, Raxis Attack, you are likely discovering one of these check-the-box options. While these systems, as long as they include automated exploits, can meet compliance, they are likely to miss critical vulnerabilities that manually performed exploits would reveal.
If you are interested in a continual discovery and vulnerability management solution, you may be interested in our Raxis Protect service, but keep in mind that it is not a penetration test and does not meet compliance requirements for pentests for that very reason.
The Importance of Manual Human Testing
Raxis firmly believes that PTaaS should provide equivalent coverage to the standard annual penetration test that many organizations have performed for years. That’s why Raxis Attack includes several layers, from discovery and vulnerability scans to specialized vulnerability and exploit scans that alert our customers and the Raxis Attack team to changes and vulnerabilities that require manual testing by our team of actual human testers.
Raxis Attack customers can schedule a manual penetration test of all or any part of their in-scope environment at any time based on their needs and the results of the automated tools. If the Raxis Attack team discovers a possible critical vulnerability within the automated data, they may also reach out to the customer to offer and encourage manual testing.
A key element of Raxis Attack is our human pentesting team, and that team is continually available to our customers via chat and video call to discuss their Raxis Attack findings. We like to see our team, whose members hold several certifications and strong experience in both the red team and blue team side of the equation, as a fractional pentester member of your team. Our goal is the same as yours: for you to discover and understand vulnerabilities within your infrastructure so that you can fix them and close the gaps that could allow an attacker to exploit your organization.
Comparing PTaaS to Traditional Penetration Testing
Traditional penetration testing, such as Raxis Strike, is still the most common testing performed by many organizations. These pentests meet compliance requirements as well as providing clients with detailed findings and remediation advice. The limitation of traditional penetration tests is that they occur during a set period of time, often annually or bi-annually, and usually allow one retest within a window after the initial test.
If new vulnerabilities and exploits become available after a traditional pentest is complete, the organization may wait a year to discover their systems or web applications are vulnerable. With PTaaS, on the other hand, the vulnerability would appear in automated tests and alert the organization to run an on-demand human penetration test on the affected assets in real time. PTaaS also allows for retesting of findings, including human manual testing on specific remediated systems, at any time.
While traditional penetration tests by a qualified company are still a legitimate and strong option for security-minded organizations and companies looking to meet compliance needs, we expect to see more organizations trend towards PTaaS, which meets all of the same compliance needs as a traditional test, this year and into the future.
How Much Should PTaaS Cost?
As we mentioned above, if a PTaaS option costs less than a manual traditional penetration test, such as Raxis Strike, that option is likely fully automated and misses the key element of PTaaS – the human penetration tester. Beyond that, PTaaS price ranges can vary widely.
For network PTaaS, both external and internal, the pricing depends on the number of assets. Many organizations can meet budgets by limiting their PTaaS scope and possibly complementing it with a traditional penetration test of a larger scope. This option has allowed many Raxis Attack customers to test out the system and prove its worth in order to gain a larger budget to increase their scope in following years.
Raxis Attack for internal networks also includes segmentation testing for PCI when appropriate, allowing PTaaS to become a comprehensive compliance solution.
PTaaS for web applications is often more complicated, but the scoping is the same as for a traditional penetration test, taking into account authentication, user input, storage of PII and other sensitive data, and the number of user roles available for testing.
“We won’t compromise quality for growth. Our PTaaS reflects Raxis’ dedication to precision and protection.”
Raxis CEO, Mark Puckett
While PTaaS costs range from suspiciously cheap to high dollar, a trusted PTaaS vendor will be willing to work with your team to discover options that work best for your organization.
In Conclusion
PTaaS represents the future of cybersecurity testing because it offers scalability, flexibility, and a continuous approach to security assessments. Unlike traditional penetration testing, which often involves one-off engagements, PTaaS offers ongoing, real-time vulnerability detection and remediation guidance with human testers.
This continuous model allows organizations to keep pace with the rapidly evolving threat landscape, providing a proactive rather than reactive approach to security.
Companies like Raxis exemplify this shift by combining automated vulnerability scanning with manual testing by certified ethical hackers, ensuring thorough cybersecurity assessments. Moreover, the real-time reporting and remediation guidance provided within the custom Raxis One environment allows businesses to prioritize and address vulnerabilities promptly.
This service model not only helps in maintaining compliance with regulations like PCI DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR but also integrates seamlessly into the software development lifecycle (SDLC), making PTaaS a superior choice for comprehensive and agile cybersecurity testing.
