For years, cybersecurity conventional wisdom has recommended regularly rotating penetration testing vendors. While this can be good advice, it’s become so prevalent that many companies have adopted blanket internal policies that require changing pentest vendors every few years.
But is pentesting vendor rotation still a best practice in 2025, or has it become an outdated security practice?
In this blog, we'll examine the pros and cons of rotating security testing providers and debunk the myth that changing vendors enhances penetration testing effectiveness. We believe that today's best practice and policies should be around rotating testers, not vendors, and we’ll show you why.
TL;DR:
- How pentesting vendor rotation became standard practice
- The benefits of rotating pentesting vendors
- The cons of rotating pentesting vendors
- Why rotating testers rather than providers is the new way to go
- How Cobalt's Core and approach help you rotate testers without switching vendors
How rotating pentesting providers became standard operating procedure
The roots of pentesting date back to the early 1970s when the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) adopted pentesting techniques following recommendations from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The task force’s advice included independent security certification by groups independent of development teams.
Fast forward to the late 90s and early 2000s, when pentesting became a more established security practice, with pentesters now being referred to as ethical hackers. By this time there were multiple new security tools like NMAP and Nessus available for automated scanning, as well as new techniques for manual pentesting.
Additionally, the early pentesting community was relatively small, and security teams were proportionately small. If you wanted to expand the expertise of your pentesting team to include testers capable of deploying new tools and delivering a fresh perspective, finding different providers seemed like the only option.
Because of this, vendor rotation became standard practice in the early days of the pentesting industry. Still to this day, you'll find seemingly authoritative recommendations from top analyst firms advising you to change pentesting companies every two to three years to avoid blind spots and maintain a fresh view of vulnerabilities. But while this may have made sense when there were fewer tools and smaller teams, does it remain a good policy in today’s mature, global, “as-a-service” market?
Benefits of rotating pentesting vendors
In the context of early pentesting technology, the benefits of rotating providers made a compelling case. Even today, many security teams follow a practice of rotating vendors as often as once a year, citing good reasons:
- Diverse expertise: Rotating vendors can allow you to tap into pentesting teams with different skill sets than your current provider.
- New tools: Changing providers can help you take advantage of pentesting tools and tech stacks your current company isn't using.
- Enhanced methodologies: Different vendors are continually seeking ways to improve penetration testing methodologies to keep pace with evolving threats.
- Better benchmarks: Switching providers can let you monitor different key performance indicators than your current provider is tracking.
- Competitive pricing: Shopping vendors can give you an opportunity to find lower pricing for pentesting services.
While these benefits can still hold true, as pentesting technology has advanced, there are new ways to accomplish the same goals. Today's pentesting community is large enough that pentesting as a service (PTaaS) providers allow you to tap into diverse pools of pentesters, offering any set of expertise, tools, or benchmarks you require at scale to match your needs and budget.
Cons of rotating pentesting vendors
On the other hand, constantly changing your provider can have some significant drawbacks:
- Hidden costs of vendor searches: Finding a new pentesting company requires an evaluation process that can be expensive, both in terms of labor and lost productivity.
- Ongoing compliance reviews: You'll need to conduct another governance, risk, and compliance review before adopting your new provider.
- Repeated contract negotiations: Ending your relationship with your current provider may require some contract negotiations, and you'll need to draft and negotiate a service-level agreement with your new company.
- Onboarding delays: Getting set up with a new company requires establishing new communication channels, configuring new access permissions, integrating your network and apps with your provider’s tools and procedures, and completing any financial reviews and purchase order requirements to add your vendor to your payment system. Any customized configurations and procedures you had established with your previous provider will be lost in the transition to your new provider.
- Loss of continuity: Your provider will need to learn your company's systems, security policies, and procedures, while your staff will need to learn how your vendor's platform and procedures work.
- Loss of historical data: The familiarity with environments and data from dozens or hundreds of pentests over the years can be crucial as you look for positive trends and maturity in your security practices. Rotating vendors means forgoing that historical data, making it harder to track whether your security is improving and whether your new vendor is really an upgrade.
These drawbacks tend to offset the perceived gains of rotating pentesting companies. There are definitely scenarios where a lack of quality results or a new set of eyes would be beneficial to your security testing outcomes. However, by mandating changes every few years, or by rotating providers unnecessarily, you may actually weaken the net effectiveness and cost-efficiency of your pentesting procedures.
Today's best practice: Find vendors with a broad range of expertise and a deep bench of testers
With today’s PTaaS providers, you can tap into diverse expertise, a large pool of pentesters, and additional services without changing your vendor.
This means you only have to get set up once, avoiding the time and cost of finding new providers, negotiating new contracts, and onboarding repeatedly. Your system access and asset sharing remain consistent across your provider’s testing environment.
Meanwhile, your vendor is already familiar with your environment, security policies, and priorities, enabling you to leverage previous findings and build a stronger security posture with a programmatic approach. You can maintain continuity with your historical benchmarks while customizing your metrics as needed. You can also deploy pentests more rapidly and incorporate your findings more quickly for ongoing, continuous improvement of your security controls. And as you grow, you can scale up your testing on demand as needed to match your needs and budget.
When you can enjoy these benefits with a single PTaaS provider, there's no more need to rotate vendors. Sticking with one quality provider is today’s best practice.
How the Cobalt Core helps eliminate the need to change providers
With access to hundreds of testers on demand, you can now change security experts for a fresh look at your applications, networks, or LLMs, without rotating companies.
The Cobalt Core of elite pentesters is made up of over 450 security experts from over 75 countries. They are highly vetted through a strict process that qualifies only the top 5% of applicants.The Core averages 11 years of experience, with a total of over 3,000 hours of pentesting experience, handling over 35,000 bugs.
Cobalt also works to keep our methodologies up to date with the latest threats and adversarial advancements. This means our testers are using the latest tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to ensure your applications and environments are secure, all within a single platform.
Rotating pentesting vendors made sense when qualified testers were scarce and teams were small, but with the rise of PTaaS and ethical hacking teams like the Cobalt Core, you don't need to switch providers to gain a fresh perspective on your security. Connect with our team to get started and discuss how we can help you find the right pentest provider for years to come..
How to choose the best PTaaS provider for your needs
Choosing the right pentesting provider is key to the success of your security initiatives, but there are many options to choose from. Pentesting in 2025 and Beyond: A Strategic Guide to Choosing the Right Security Testing Partner, presents an overview of the market and important considerations as you select a vendor. This comprehensive guide includes a checklist of features and services to look for, and pros/cons to consider when choosing the right partner for your current and future pentesting needs.
