While Risk assessment is focused on evaluating your business’s position in the digital realm and identifies all systems and assigns risk scores to each, the process is performed from a defensive standpoint with a goal to understand all the key factors and determine best ways to protect all the critical assets. In contrast, next step is more offensive in nature and goes to actively exploit those vulnerabilities in order to prove (or disprove) real world attack vectors against an organization’s IT assets, data, humans and/or physical security. Simply put, a penetration test, or pentest is a test evaluating the strengths of all security controls across your organizations systems. These tests evaluate procedural and operational controls, as well as technological and human controls. It is important to draw a distinction that Penetration testing is not the same as vulnerability scanning. Running a vulnerability scanner against a website or set of IP addresses will produce a list of items that still need to be verified by a trained professional. Penetration tests are a lot more time and resource intensive. Conducted by security professionals whose main focus is ensuring that your network is secured, a penetration test will dive below the surface and find the true vulnerabilities within your network. Axis consultants employ a myriad of automated tools and process frameworks in accordance with industry’s best practices to encompass all possible combinations of a simulated attack on your networks. Nevertheless, the focus is ultimately on the team of testers, the experience they bring to the test, and the skills they level in the context of an active attack on your organization. We will also stress your operational procedures and exploit any human vulnerability to ensure we cover all of our bases to provide you with the most accurate assessment.