The Market for Penetration Testers

The company I plan on working with is for IT Penetration Testers. The potential customers are medium and large companies that have expendable funds to do security testing but not enough funds to have their own in-house security testing and assessment staff. The organization that hires Penetration testers will be in many different market silos including Aerospace, manufacturing, and any others that have intellectual property that they want to protect.  The attitudes and beliefs of the company executives are such that they are technologically aware but at the same time they are knowledgeable in the fact that keeping up with changes in vulnerabilities, malware and advanced persistent threats is imperative to maintaining the defenses of the company and to keep it viable.

A huge market for penetration testers lies with companies vying for PCI (payment card industry) compliance. It is important to note though that merely wanting to check off a box on a spreadsheet could be a costly mistake and a bad use of the technology. It is much better for people to be forward thinking and focused on hardening their internal and external boundaries.