Pentest report automation just makes sense if you’re a pentester. You automate some of the slowest and most time-consuming parts of pentesting, saving anywhere from a few hours to a few days per report and then spend your time editing data once it’s there. That saves on average about 50% of time across all types of pentests, but up to about 85% for some.
Those kinds of time savings are important for freeing you up to do skilled work. That’s more and more crucial considering increased cybersecurity obligations, skills shortages, and regulations that require organizations to show more and more proof of compliance. You need to spend your time doing what you’re good at and that means automating the manual overhead like task management, scheduling, and reporting.
Once you do the research and pick tools, you still have to take those tools to your manager, to finance, or directly to your boss. How do you convince them you need pentest report automation?
Show the Business Case
You save time on pentest reporting, but what does that mean as a business case? Creating a convincing case that you need pentest report automation software means understanding what your manager cares about and what they’re going to pay attention to. In most cases, those pain points are going to be:
- Total cost of project (man-hours spent on the report, editing, collating data, etc., skilled labor hours spent on non-skilled labor like reporting are a liability)
- Total hours spent on the project (chances are you have a backlog and reducing hours on a project means getting to work on other projects)
- Report quality and consistency (does every report turn out the same? How often do copy-paste errors happen?)
- Other areas the tooling saves you money, like reductions in overhead, speeding up collaboration, or better visibility of pipelines.
So, if you look at a slightly more complex pentest with a goal scenario, where you first find vulnerabilities and then attempt to exploit them to reach a goal, you could be spending 14-16 hours on reporting. Some of those hours will be on mindless copy-paste tasks like updating customer information, adding boilerplates, copying findings from one tool to another, etc.
You’ll also want to look at quality of results. If you can show your manager that they can produce a better result for the customer as an added bonus, that’s going to be a major selling point. If you’re automatically pulling data from tools, importing client boilerplates, and pulling library content, you’ll do away with copy-paste
Consider Business Priorities for Adopting New Technologies
The larger your organization, the harder it is going to be to introduce new technologies. In most cases, you’ll need:
- A list of competitors and price-point comparisons
- Value-case, does the product justify its cost?
- Integration options and whether the pentest report automation software works with your pentest tooling. Options like API integration can also be very good, but out of the box integrations that allow you to use the product without further investment are also important.
- Security and ability to meet internal compliance and security requirements
- Scalability, such as ability to grow the team, scale to different parts of the business, etc.
- Product fit. Here, you’ll likely have to make a list of pain points/needs and then make sure the product solves those pain points.
You’ll always have to test your chosen pentest report automation software as part of proving the business case. With Cyver Core, you get 15 days to do that, on your own tenant. You can also download our whitepaper on the ROI of pentest report automation software here if you want something to share right away.