Posted on: December 17, 2025

The Automation Imperative: Why Pentest Delivery Must Catch Up With Continuous Testing

Security feels a lot like Whac-A-Mole these days. Between cloud-native architectures, microservices, APIs, and rapid deployment cycles, cybersecurity threats are constantly popping up and redefining how software is built and delivered. Yet penetration testing, which is a proven method for identifying exploitable weaknesses, remains a point-in-time snapshot.
In some cases, annual penetration tests don’t even happen. BizTech Magazine reports that 1 in 3 companies cite budget as their reason for not conducting the tests more frequently. Even organizations that have evolved beyond semi-annual testing to continuous penetration testing are hitting a bottleneck: outdated, manual pentest delivery methods. Findings are often siloed, leaving their pentest data far from the rest of their vulnerability data.

Regardless, pentesting identifies critical faults, but manual testing slows response times and creates unnecessary risk windows. Pentest delivery must evolve to automated penetration testing.

What’s Wrong with Traditional Pentest Models?

1. The Manual Pentest Delivery Snapshot Problem

Manual penetration tests are often delivered over weeks. By the time it reaches the requester’s hands, the penetration reports and findings delivery is already outdated. Because the reality is, the minute after the test runs, a new attack may have snuck in. Code changes, new APIs, cloud deployments, and infrastructure updates all alter the attack surface, leaving gaps until the next testing window.

2. Time, Costs, & Scalability Constraints

Human-led testing is essential in offensive security even with AI, for discovering creative and complex attack chaining, but it’s also time-consuming, expensive, and often limited in scope. Worse yet, many penetration testing services deliver static PDF reports that require manual ticketing and retesting.

3. Data Silos Delay Action

Results from scanners and pentests rarely live together, making it difficult to correlate data, prioritize risks, and remediate vulnerabilities quickly. To top it off, remediation tracking often resides in spreadsheets with disjointed coordination from red and blue teams, which makes it difficult to retest and weakens accountability.

4. The Risk Window Is Left Wide Open

It’s no surprise to anyone that active exploits and breaches happen every second. CISA has an enormous database of CVEs, and it’s constantly growing. Vulnerabilities can be weaponized within an hour of disclosure. A non-continuous program that pentests every few months leaves organizations exposed, even though they won’t know till the next assessment.

5. Misalignment With DevOps & Agile

Development teams ship daily. They’re crunching code, new apps, and constant updates. If security validation isn’t happening just as quickly, it creates friction and slows product development lifecycles. This makes continuous DevSecOps pentesting important for teams of all sizes.

Learn more about the Future of Manual Security Testing and what it means for you.

How to Make the Shift Toward Continuous Validation?

What Continuous Validation Means in Pentesting?

Continuous validation, also known as continuous security validation (CSV), is a process of ongoing testing and analysis of an organization’s security to ensure effectiveness against threats.

Continuous penetration testing involves:

Ongoing pentesting
Triggers that are automated by change events (deployments, code commits, etc)
Integrations into DevSecOps and CI/CD pipelines
Replacing the point-in-time pentests with always-on processes

Ready to take what’s great about pentesting and make it even better with the gold standard of continuous pentesting? Discover how in our blog.

Why Continuous Validation Is Becoming the New Norm?

There’s an exposure management shift from one-off pentests to continued resilience because of:

The growth of cloud, containers, and APIs
Shorter development cycles and near-constant deployments due to AI
Improved attacker agility with advances in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)
Compliance demands that require more than annual report checkboxes
The enterprise adoption of continuous validation and continuous threat exposure management (CTEM) strategies

What Are the Benefits of Continuous Security Validation?

Quicker detection and remediation: Consistent monitoring and data validation help identify issues quickly and minimize potential damage.
Rapid adaptation and agility: Ongoing validation empowers organizations to review processes and systems continuously and adjust as needed.
Reduced risk faster: Detecting security issues quickly minimizes security gaps and greater risks, such as a cyberattack or data breach.
Better visibility and decision-making: Combining continuous validation with continuous monitoring brings improved visibility across the tech stack.
Stronger security posture and compliance: Catching vulnerabilities like misconfigurations early on will help strengthen security measures and practices.

Pave the way to fast, continuous cycles of testing and validation while avoiding common roadblocks with workflow automation. Discover how in our Fast Track Continuous Validation eBook.

Why Do You Need Pentest Delivery Automation?

Increasing the pentesting frequency doesn’t solve the bottleneck of findings delivery. In fact, it creates more and bigger bottlenecks without automation as you can’t scale manual delivery.

What Are the Downsides of Traditional Pentest Workflows?

In traditional penetration testing, everything is manual. From the pentesting report creation to the tickets, triage, and retesting. They often don’t integrate with developer workflows, which dilutes and slows the process.

What Automated Pentest Delivery Looks Like

With automated pentest delivery, you can expect automated integrations, automated scheduling, and automated data correlations, including:

Direct integrations for an ongoing flow of findings into Jira, ServiceNow, Azure DevOPs, and more.
Real-time reports and dashboards instead of static, outdated PDFs.
Automated asset discovery, change-triggered testing, and continuous vulnerability assessments and scanning.
A steady flow of retesting, verification, and better collaboration.

As automated findings delivery is streamlined into DevOps pipelines, security findings become more actionable, measurable, and trackable.

What Are the Challenges to Consider for Automating Pentest Delivery?

When you begin shifting to automating pentest delivery, keep the following in mind.

1. Integrating Tools & Scope

Be sure to scan your environment and make notes of assets and tools that your organization uses. This can help ensure the security tools will integrate effectively across CI/CD, asset management, scanners, pentesting tools, and ticketing systems. The tools you consider should cover the depth and breadth of your attack surface, rather than mere automatic scanning.

2. Maintaining Human Expertise

Penetration testing automation tools are making security teams’ jobs easier. But AI enhances processes. It does not replace human expertise. You need people to review logic flaws, novel chain attacks, and business context exploitation.

3. Managing Alert Fatigue & Prioritization

Continuous pentest delivery automation will dispatch continuous alerts. Some of those alerts will undoubtedly be false positives. We recommend implementing automation into your triage and risk prioritization to help teams from burning out and focusing on the wrong vulnerabilities.

4. Cultural & Process Shifts

As always, changes in processes require a shift in mindset. Security, DevOps, and development must all work hand in hand to create a continuous feedback loop and ensure the tooling and processes are optimized.

5. Compliance Readiness Requirements

Continuous penetration testing programs still need point-in-time snapshots, particularly for compliance. With Plextrac, teams can get living, real-time, actionable data, while also getting point-in-time reports for historical purposes that are easily exportable for the auditors.

What Is a Recommended Roadmap to Evolving towards Automating Pentest Delivery?

Step 1: Set Up Your Baseline, Resources, and Asset Inventory

Identify critical assets, APIs, and delivery pipelines
Create an up-to-date attack surface inventory
Designate a mobilization coordinator for directing resources
Map pentest workflows, frequency, scope, and potential SLAs

Step 2: Pilot Automation

Implement automated scans that are triggered by change events
Test integrations with automated ticket creation
Start small and test a few workflows that have manual and automated deliveries
Evaluate, retest, and expand as your team feels fit

Step 3: Full Continuous Integration

Integrate automated tests in the CI/CD pipeline
Automate reporting, remediation verification, and retesting
Monitor key metrics through real-time dashboards

Phase 4: Optimization & Maturity

Keep your business in mind and modify based on business risk
Shift manual testers to complex, high-value testing and let automation handle the rest
Embrace Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) and continuous security initiatives
Let the metrics drive decisions and strategy

Best Practices for Implementing Automated Penetration Testing & Findings Delivery Workflows

Start small: Don’t try to implement it all at once.
Pick the right tools: Ensure they integrate deeply with existing workflows and solutions.
Focus on a human-led approach: Always retain a hybrid system that has humans as the backbone.
Review findings: Fixing the incoming issues is as critical as finding vulnerabilities.

The Future of Penetration Testing is Automation

Manual, periodic pentests aren’t going to cut it anymore. It can’t keep up with the risk of continuous change, expanding attack surfaces, and the latest AI threats.

As we forge ahead with pentest delivery automation and continuous validation, we will continue to see a reduction in risk through accelerated remediation and better alignment between security and DevOps.

Get an inside look into how automation is redefining pentest delivery and discover the fast track for quicker, smarter, and more consistent pentest delivery from finding to fixing. Download the Whitepaper: Automating Pentest Delivery: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you want to consolidate your data, save time, reduce risk with meaningful prioritization, and close the loop on continuous validation, request a PlexTrac demo today. We’ll show you why we were ranked as the easiest to do business with the best estimated ROI by our users.

FAQs

What’s the Difference Between Manual Penetration Testing vs Automated Pentesting?

Manual pentests differ from automated penetration tests in their approach. Manual penetration tests are run by humans as point-in-time engagements. These tests are great for deep analysis of complex vulnerabilities and attack chains. Automated pentesting uses automated triggers, change-based testing, and integration with DevOps to shrink the risk window and increase testing frequency.

Why Can’t Traditional Pentest Delivery Keep Up with Modern Changes Rates?

With growing microservices, APIs, and larger attack surfaces, manual delivery models can’t maintain accurate findings and reports. Manual pentests results are often delivered through PDF reports and are slow to retest. In an instant, a new vulnerability or CVE may be out in the wild, and the traditional pentest could have missed it.

Why Automate Pentest Delivery Instead of Increasing Frequency of Manual Tests?

You actually need both! Automated pentest delivery helps recognize the value of increased testing and enables the frequency of testing to scale. When you transition to automated penetration test delivery, you gain automated ticketing, triage, and retesting. With proper tooling integrations, you can automate even more to gain better visibility and reduce the manual workload while increasing your team’s time to remediation without burning them out. This also frees up more time for manual testing on high-priority and complex issues.

What Is Shift Left Security Testing?

Shift left testing goes hand in hand with automated pentest delivery as it moves testing and quality assurance earlier in the development lifecycle. Including testing early in development enables teams to identify and repair issues sooner, leading to less costly repairs and quicker time to remediate.

What Is the Difference Between Penetration Testing vs Vulnerability Scanning?

Penetration testing and vulnerability scanning are both critical in cybersecurity to identify vulnerabilities, but they have their own roles. A penetration test is a manual, in-depth test that simulates attacks to expose vulnerabilities.

A vulnerability scan is an automated process used to find known vulnerabilities quickly. These are typically less expensive than the professionally run pentests.

Will Automation Replace Human Pentesters?

No. Penetration testing automation tools are making security teams’ jobs easier. But AI enhances processes. It does not replace human expertise. You need people to review logic flaws, novel chain attacks, and complex exploitations.

How Does Continuous Pentesting Support Compliance?

Continuous pentesting provides ongoing evidence of your progress in improving your security posture, continuous audit readiness, and the ability to generate point-in-time reports when required with platforms like PlexTrac.

How Should Service Providers Shift to an Automated Approach?

Every vendor and organization will require continuous services, including pentests, as PDF reports don’t age gracefully with the latest CVEs and ever-changing attack surface. Clients will come to expect embedded services, automate delivery, integrated workflows, and real-time dashboards to keep up with the latest threats and meet compliance requirements.

PlexTrac Author At PlexTrac, we bring together insights from a diverse range of voices. Our blog features contributions from industry experts, ethical hackers, CTOs, influencers, and PlexTrac team members—all sharing valuable perspectives on cybersecurity, pentesting, and risk management.