Penetration Testing and Vulnerability Scans

A vulnerability scan tells you what is probably wrong. A penetration test tells you what someone could actually do with it. Most businesses need both, at different intervals, and for different reasons.

What the difference actually is

Scanning is automated and runs often. It checks your systems against a catalogue of known weaknesses and produces a list. That list is useful, but it is noisy, and it cannot tell you whether three low-severity findings chain together into one serious problem.

A penetration test is a person. They take the findings, look for the paths a real attacker would take, and try them in a controlled way. The output is not a list of theoretical issues, it is an account of what was reachable and how far it went.

What you get

A written report with an executive summary you can hand to a board or an insurer, plus the technical detail your IT team needs to fix things. Findings are ranked by what they actually expose, not by a generic severity score. We then walk through the remediation with you rather than handing over a PDF and leaving.

How often

Annually is the common baseline, and more often if you handle regulated data, have just made a significant infrastructure change, or your insurer or a major client asks for it. Scans run on a much shorter cycle, usually monthly or quarterly.