In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) are on the front lines, protecting organizations from an increasingly sophisticated array of cyber threats. Human-led penetration testing (pen-testing) has long been a critical tool in their arsenal to identify and mitigate vulnerabilities. However, the traditional model has become obsolete and is no longer sufficient to face the complexity and frequency of modern cyberattacks.
This blog explores the current state of penetration testing, the challenges MSSPs face, and why adopting an augmented approach that blends human expertise and automation is now considered a necessity.
Penetration testing in its traditional form involves skilled security professionals simulating attacks to identify and exploit vulnerabilities within an organization’s digital infrastructure. While this approach remains indispensable, it has its limitations.
The traditional penetration testing is resource intensive as it requires a highly skilled workforce, which is expensive and difficult to scale. In fact, the latest ISACA research, published this October, notes that 61% of European cybersecurity professionals consider their organization understaffed, and over half (52%) believe that their organization’s cybersecurity budget is underfunded. Additionally, 48% report still unfilled open positions which require experience, a university degree, or other credentials, making it clear that the growing demand for cybersecurity expertise has not only strained budgets but has also far outpaced the supply of qualified professionals, leaving many MSSPs scrambling to find or train talent.
Even if they do manage to find talent, manual testing is often time-consuming and full of bottlenecks in the shape of cumbersome manual tasks, meaning that even if MSSPs do have enough talented professionals, they can still be overwhelmed by the scale of operations and client expectations.
Moreover, high-quality pen-testing is reliant on ethical hackers being able to find creative ways to identify vulnerabilities. This happens to be its biggest value and its greatest weakness since pen-testers are usually forced to waste precious time in patching up information from different sources and writing reports from scratch, leading to the risk for inadequate service delivery for larger enterprises or multi-tenant environments typical of MSSPs.
Finally, in its traditional form, penetration testing is often a periodic, one-off activity. This approach leaves organizations exposed to evolving threats during the gaps between scheduled tests, creating a critical blind spot. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, 74% of organizations suffer successful cyberattacks between these assessments, with the average breach costing $4.45 million. Furthermore, modern cloud environments, where system configurations change every 12 hours on average, exacerbate this issue, making it nearly impossible for point-in-time testing to offer sustainable protection.
The periodic nature of traditional penetration testing poses challenges to MSSPs as well, leaving them with unpredictable project flows and revenue streams.
By putting pressure on service delivery, these challenges also impact business performance, making it hard to predict workload, manage costs and maintain healthy margins.
To address these limitations, MSSPs are urged to find a more scalable and efficient model. The augmented pen-testing is one possible solution, as it combines human expertise with advanced technology tools to streamline operations, scale services, and provide real-time insights. This hybrid approach doesn’t replace the human element; instead, it amplifies and enhances it, making the overall process more efficient, scalable, and essentially allows to replace one-off tests with a continuous penetration testing service.
Plainsea’s platform is designed with augmenting pen-testing in mind, offering MSSPs a way to overcome the limitations of traditional approaches through innovation. Here’s how it works:
By combining human expertise with advanced technologies, MSSPs can improve efficiency, scalability, and the overall profitability of their pen-testing services. Adopting an augmented approach not only enhances the quality of security assessments but also enables MSSPs to deliver faster, more comprehensive insights to their clients without additional headcount.
Ready to experience the benefits of augmented pen-testing? Book a demo with Plainsea today!
