Creating awareness

The importance to your business

Penetration Testing is extremely important in terms of creating an awareness of your networks, whilst providing you with the information to enable you to be vigilant to security risk, especially when you consider the changes to working methods over the last 2 years.

As we saw the introduction of and continuation of remote and hybrid working environments, with employees requiring access to business resources, normally kept secure behind a firewall, potential security risks have increased tenfold.

Penetration Testing will allow you to identify which addresses and ports are visible externally, providing you with the information required to reduce your public exposure to a minimum, reducing the risk of attack.

Penetration Testing is often referred to as ‘ethical hacking’ the reason for this is because essentially the process of carrying out the test replicates what a hacker would do.

The difference however is that we would be looking to identify vulnerabilities within your network to better secure it, whereas a hacker would be looking to identify those vulnerabilities to exploit them and cause harm, examples including accessing files, data and customer databases, basically they will look to identify any areas within the network that can be misused or manipulated.

Our Penetration Tests are only carried out with the expressed consent of the customer, with the sole intention to identify any vulnerabilities, reporting all findings back to the customer along with a list of recommendations that upon remediation will better secure the network system architecture, at no point would we be attempting to cause harm or leave the customer vulnerable.

As with anything security related, hackers are continually looking for ways to infiltrate networks, therefore the frequency of Penetration Testing is something to be considered.

In the first instance the frequency may be dictated by company policy, however if not, our recommendation for carrying out Penetration Testing will differ depending on business activity, if your business makes frequent firewall changes, then 3-6 monthly Penetration Tests will be beneficial, however if very few changes are made then an annual testing should be adequate.

A Penetration Test consists of several stages, an in-depth understanding of the stages can be found by clicking here, but broadly speaking the stages include the pre-planning element, which focusses on business continuity and minimising any business disruption and obtaining business consent.

Following this the test is carried out, before the report creation and presentation with recommendations being provided to mitigate any risks identified.

These recommendations can then be completed by either the business internally, or by Data Installation & Supplies, which when complete will reduce the risk of cyber-attack.

Take a few moments to read all the information on Penetration Testing provided across this page and our related insight pages, watch the short video clip, download our white paper and then please get in touch with us as we would love the opportunity to discuss your individual business requirements with you further, please contact Data Installation & Supplies on 01274 869 099 or info@disnorth.com.