Penetration testing services built for continuous delivery

What a penetration testing service should actually deliver

Most penetration testing services are still sold the way consultancies sold them twenty years ago: you scope an engagement, wait weeks for a slot, get two weeks of testing and a PDF, and then run blind until next year's budget cycle. Strike sells the same expertise as a subscription that never stops — because the systems being tested never stop changing either. Below is what that covers and how to pick the right entry point.

Scope starts from assets, not from days. We map what you actually expose — domains and subdomains, the APIs behind your front ends, cloud accounts, external infrastructure, the mobile backends nobody remembered to list — and then agree what is in and out. That inventory is the scope, and because it is continuously monitored, an asset that appears next month is picked up rather than quietly falling outside a document signed in January.

Depth is set separately from breadth. A public marketing site and a payments API do not need the same level of attention, so testing effort concentrates where the business impact is: authenticated flows, privilege boundaries, money movement, and anything holding customer data.

External web applications and the APIs behind them, REST and GraphQL alike, including authenticated flows and the boundaries that are supposed to keep tenants apart. Cloud accounts and their configuration, identity and permission models. External infrastructure, exposed services and the network edge. Mobile backends. Internal systems where the engagement calls for it.

The surfaces that get skipped are usually the ones that matter: a staging environment left reachable from the internet, an internal admin panel sitting on a public subdomain, an API version that was supposed to be deprecated two quarters ago. Continuous discovery is what surfaces those, and it runs whether or not anyone remembered to write them into a scope document.

A fixed-scope engagement makes sense when the thing being tested is fixed. Nothing in a modern stack is: you ship weekly, dependencies update themselves, infrastructure moves, and permissions drift. The annual model was designed for a world of quarterly releases and it produces a predictable failure — a clean report in March and an unvalidated environment from April onwards.

A subscription changes the economics as well as the coverage. Instead of renegotiating a statement of work every time you want something retested, retesting availability depends on the subscribed scope and each retest is tied to the finding it closes. Instead of paying separately for each new application, the surface is covered as it grows. And instead of one report a year, you accumulate a dated evidence trail, which is what supports an audit and compliance programme.

Cybersecurity services and penetration testing services: what each one covers

A cybersecurity service covers prevention, detection and response across the whole surface. Penetration testing is the part that checks, with permission and under controlled conditions, whether those controls hold up against a real attack. A buyer evaluating cybersecurity services almost always needs both layers: the one that keeps the operation running and the one that verifies it.

Penetration testing services, answered

What does a penetration testing service include?

Scoping and asset discovery, the testing itself, expert human validation before customer delivery, a report with severities and reproduction steps, remediation guidance, and a retest confirming the fix holds. With Strike all of that is continuous, according to the subscribed scope, rather than a sequence of separately budgeted phases.

How is penetration testing priced?

Traditional providers price by tester-days, which is why a scope negotiation is really a haggle over how long someone will look. Strike prices by the surface covered, as a subscription. That means the cost is predictable and does not go up because you asked for a fix to be retested.

How long does a penetration test take?

A conventional engagement runs two to four weeks of testing after a scoping period that is often longer than the test. Three separate clocks apply at Strike and they should not be added together: platform setup takes under 5 minutes once the target information and access are ready; the start of execution depends on scope authorisation and access; the first validated finding arrives in approximately 1 hour and the curated set in 1-2 hours, on supported scopes.

What do we actually receive?

Validated findings in a platform your team can work from, with severity, evidence and reproduction steps; guided remediation; on-demand retesting subject to the subscribed scope; and exportable reports that support audit and compliance programs, which you hand to a customer security review or to your auditor without rewriting them.

Which service is right for us?

If you ship software continuously, start with continuous testing and add web application depth. If you are preparing for an audit, start from the compliance evidence angle. If you want to know whether your detection and response actually work, that is a red team engagement, not a pentest. Most teams end up combining two of the three.

How do we get started?

Book a demo. We map your external surface with you, agree on scope and depth, and get testing running. There is no procurement marathon and no minimum multi-year commitment required to begin.