How Often Should You Conduct a Penetration Test?

Most compliance frameworks and industry best practice recommend, at minimum, an annual penetration test covering externally facing systems and any environment handling sensitive data.

Beyond the annual baseline, testing should be triggered by significant events: a major application release, a new cloud migration, an infrastructure redesign, or after any suspected security incident.

Organizations with a high rate of change increasingly supplement periodic testing with lighter, more frequent assessments of new features, keeping the overall security posture aligned with a constantly evolving codebase.