PTaaS for MSPs: What Is It?

Penetration Testing as a Service (PTaaS) has become the latest buzzword in cybersecurity, pitched as a “modern solution” to traditional testing. The promise?

Continuous testing, faster remediation, and an easy dashboard for your clients.

But for MSPs, the reality is far from ideal.


Here is why...

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1. No Siloed Client Access Creating Chaos

Most PTaaS platforms were built for direct-to-end-customer delivery. That means every client gets their own portal login, their own reports, and their own billing. Sounds fine, right?

Until you try to manage ten clients under one MSSP umbrella.

There's no multi-tenant dashboard, no unified reporting, and certainly no efficient way to manage testing across dozens (or hundreds) of end customers. Your engineers end up bouncing between dashboards. Your clients get lost in interfaces that weren’t designed for them. And your team wastes hours trying to stitch together deliverables from disparate silos.

2. No White-Label Billing Means You Look Like a Reseller

Most MSPs want to maintain full client ownership. But most PTaaS vendors don’t let you white-label the platform, the emails, or — most critically — the invoices.

Instead, your client gets a bill or portal invite from some third-party vendor they’ve never heard of.

This undermines your brand and makes you look like a middleman, not a true provider. Worse, it opens the door for the PTaaS company to upsell your clients behind your back.

3. You're Hosting a Playbook for Hacking Your Clients

This is the big one. This is a zero trust environment.

When you run pentests through a PTaaS platform, you're centralizing all vulnerability data including screenshots, credentials, and known exploits in a third-party system.

In effect, you’re storing a live blueprint for how to hack your customers.

If that PTaaS vendor is breached, you’re the one left explaining to a dozen clients why their networks were compromised. And even if the platform is secure, it’s still a single point of failure and a juicy target for attackers.

For MSPs managing critical infrastructure, healthcare orgs, or regulated environments, that’s a risk you can’t afford to take.

4. No PTaaS Platform Is The Same

Let’s not forget: many PTaaS companies still rely heavily on fake pentests via automated pentesting . They may market “human-led” testing, but in reality, it’s a glorified vulnerability scan wrapped in a slick UI.

MSPs need real adversary simulation. Manual effort. Scoping that reflects compliance frameworks like HIPAA or PCI DSS.

If the output can’t stand up to an auditor or a vCISO’s review, then what are you actually paying for?

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PTaaS sounds convenient. But for MSPs, the platform comes at the cost of control, security, and quality.

Your clients trust you to deliver secure, custom-fit solutions not just plug them into a SaaS product and hope it holds up.

At the end of the day, a real pentest is only as good as the people running it and a platform doesn’t replace that.

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