One of the most common questions organisations ask about penetration testing is how often it should be done. The answer depends on your risk profile, regulatory environment, and rate of change — but there are clear baselines.
The Minimum Baseline: Annual
An annual penetration test is the minimum baseline for any organisation with meaningful digital exposure. This is also the frequency mandated or recommended by most regulatory frameworks — BSP Circular 982, BNM RMiT, MAS TRM Guidelines, APRA CPS 234, PCI DSS, and most ISO 27001 implementations all expect at least annual testing.
For organisations that do nothing else, an annual assessment provides the foundational check that identifies accumulated vulnerabilities and validates the current state of your security controls.
Trigger-Based Testing
Beyond the annual baseline, penetration testing should be triggered by significant events: launching a new application or major feature, significant infrastructure changes (cloud migration, network redesign), merging with or acquiring another organisation's systems, after a security incident (to verify the attack vector is closed and no other compromises exist), and major changes to your technology stack or architecture.
Continuous or Quarterly Approaches
Organisations with high rates of change — frequent deployments, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, rapidly evolving applications — increasingly adopt more frequent testing cadences. This might mean quarterly penetration tests focused on new functionality, or continuous penetration testing programs (sometimes called PTaaS — Penetration Testing as a Service) that provide ongoing expert assessment aligned to the development cycle.
The right cadence depends on how quickly your attack surface changes. An organisation that deploys weekly needs more frequent testing than one that releases quarterly.
Vulnerability Scanning Between Tests
Between penetration tests, continuous or frequent vulnerability scanning provides baseline coverage. Scans catch newly disclosed vulnerabilities (CVEs) in your environment and ensure that basic hygiene is maintained. But scanning is not a substitute for penetration testing — it's a complement.
The Cost of Inaction
Organisations that delay testing to save costs are making a risk trade-off. The cost of a penetration test is a fraction of the cost of a breach — and the regulatory and reputational consequences of a breach that testing would have prevented far exceed the testing investment.
How Simuna Infosec Helps
We support organisations across the testing-frequency spectrum — from annual comprehensive assessments to ongoing engagement models that align testing to your release cycle. Our dual-round model ensures that remediated vulnerabilities are verified, so each testing cycle builds on the last.