PENETRATION TESTING VS VULNERABILITY MANAGEMENT

Megan Poljacik • May 29, 2025

When it comes to protecting your company’s infrastructure, two commonly used terms often cause confusion: vulnerability management and penetration testing. While they both serve the same purpose of keeping your data secure, they work very differently.


Think of your company’s IT infrastructure like a museum that stores priceless artifacts. To keep it secure, you wouldn’t just install locks and hope for the best. You’d want to routinely check those locks, ensure windows are closed properly, and perhaps even hire someone to test how easy it is to break in. This is basically the difference between vulnerability management and penetration testing.



Vulnerability management is a risk-driven practice of identifying and fixing known weaknesses in your systems. It’s like regular maintenance: checking for outdated software, misconfigurations, or common security flaws. These scans are usually automated and run periodically. It’s proactive and ongoing, much like a constant digital health check. When vulnerabilities are discovered, you get the right people, tools, and processes working together to fix the biggest problems—or at least keep them under control—before they cause any serious trouble.


Penetration testing, on the other hand, is a deliberate, controlled attempt to breach your systems by ethical hackers you hire. Unlike automated scans, this process involves human experts or an automated penetration testing platform, simulating real-world attacks to see how far they can get and what damage they might do. The goal is to hunt for a “back door” and see what sensitive data or systems they could access if they succeeded.


For businesses, both methods are essential. Vulnerability management helps you stay ahead of evolving risks by continuously reducing your exposure, while penetration testing puts your defenses to the test. Developing and testing your security posture is crucial to understanding your exposure and keeping up with the latest threats. Together, vulnerability management and penetration testing create a balanced approach that’s focused on both prevention and response.

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WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE CLOUD GOES DOWN?

By Megan Poljacik & Bryan Doherty • November 24, 2025
The internet has had a series of bad days over the last few months. In October, Microsoft 365 briefly went sideways in North America after a network misconfiguration disrupted access to Teams and Exchange Online before service recovered the same day. A few weeks later, Microsoft Azure suffered an outage after a faulty configuration change was pushed to Azure Front Door Configuration, affecting Microsoft 365, Xbox, and other services worldwide. Around the same time Amazon crashed, stating that an AWS disruption stemmed from a DNS automation bug associated with DynamoDB. This is an automated system that directs internet traffic that made a timing mistake, and that small glitch quickly snowballed and knocked parts of the service offline. Most recently, Cloudflare, a service many websites use to load faster and block bad traffic, went down, leaving millions unable to access sites and services. It’s no surprise that many business owners are now asking whether the cloud is still a safe choice for their business. Short answer: yes. For most small and mid-size companies, the cloud is still the safest, most cost-effective place to run everyday tools. It delivers enterprise-grade security, constant patching, and built-in resilience that would be expensive to match on your own. But “safe” doesn’t mean “never fail.”

ESTABLISHING AN AI POLICY FRAMEWORK: BALANCING INNOVATION AND RISK

August 27, 2025
By Bryan Doherty

IMPACTFUL VIRUSES IN HISTORY: STUXNET

By Megan Poljacik • July 31, 2025
In the early 2000s, tensions in the middle east were on the rise. Iran’s government had begun expanding its uranium enrichment capabilities, insisting it was for nuclear energy purposes. However many countries around the globe feared it was a coverup for a nuclear weapons program. Despite pressure from United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran continued to enrich uranium. Frustrations reached a fever pitch and it appeared a conflict was imminent, until a mysterious solution came from a completely unexpected source: the Stuxnet Computer Worm.