Five Years of Listening – How Cyver Grew From a Reporting Tool into Something Bigger

Any business in any industry will tell you how important it is to listen to feedback. Whether it’s a new feature from a software company or a smartphone from a technology company, customer feedback is the foundation that ensures you improve and evolve in a way that’s valuable for the people you serve.

Nowhere is that more important, however, than in the cybersecurity space, where not listening to feedback can literally result in a business being brought to its knees. 

An Evolving World of Attacks and Exploits

Just last year, it was reported that there were over 22,000 major cyber incidents, with 425.7 million leaked user accounts and billions of daily automated threat attempts worldwide.

Bear in mind, around 20% of small and medium-sized businesses end up permanently closing after a cyber breach, and it becomes clear why cybersecurity tools are so important. 

Not just this, it demonstrates why the refinement and evolution of those tools are necessary, since no solution is going to be perfect from the outset.

To formulate a tool or platform that works and makes a notable difference in a client’s cybersecurity, it’s crucial to listen to the client and refine the tool based on their real-world needs.

If this isn’t done, what could be a good, effective solution might feasibly be reaching around 70% of its potential, with that remaining 30% being the difference between preventing an attack and suffering the consequences. 

There are subsectors to cybersecurity with some areas being more critical than others, and Cyver is the perfect showcase of a company doing this in a subsector that sits at the heart of cyber defence.

Pentesting: The First Line of Defence

The methods of attackers are constantly evolving, with emerging cybersecurity threats being added to the existing arsenal every year.

To navigate this, many companies are required to regularly assess their security posture and identify weaknesses before these attackers actually have the chance to exploit them. 

Put simply, pentesting is the practice of simulating real-world cyberattacks against an organisation’s systems or networks, uncovering vulnerabilities before malicious actors can take advantage of them.

Rather than waiting for a breach to reveal a weakness by which point, it might be too late – pentesters proactively identify where the defences could fail and take action before they do. 

An Issue With Complexity

The issue with this, historically, is that the process is as complicated as the threats they’re finding. A pentest is not simply a case of running a scan, identifying a vulnerability, and then handing over a list of problems.

In reality, it involves multiple stages that require a lot of technical expertise and coordination, and thus require a lot of tools to manage each stage effectively. 

This is where complexity starts to grow, however, as it becomes just as much about organisation and management as it is about technical testing.

Especially as businesses continue to expand their digital environments perhaps integrating with cloud services or APIs – managing everything is only getting harder, with gaps often occurring that lead to the process being fragmented and the clients being left without the clarity they need.

The Growth of Cyver

This was the first mission in Cyver’s journey: to create a reporting tool that could simplify the process of turning findings into clear, professional reports.

Effectively, this was a starting point a solution that could solve one of the most time-consuming parts of pentesting, but as we mentioned before, the best software needs to take into account the people they’re built for and adapt their offerings to make a meaningful impact. 

Cyver could have very easily not done this. A reporting tool in itself is a strong asset, ensuring the job can be documented accurately and delivered efficiently, but this platform recognised the demands of the world they were entering the complex processes of pentesting, and the potential fallout if those processes are not successful and chose to grow into something bigger. 

They did this with five years of sustained proximity to real pentesting teams. At the beginning of the development cycle, the product team would’ve imagined how people work and built their software mainly around that.

By staying in close proximity with the users, however, Cyver could understand how people actually work, and build software that reflected this more accurate reality. 

In essence, it revealed needs that stretched well beyond reporting. Pentesting teams wanted better collaboration and greater visibility – a way to manage their findings and coordinate testing more effectively.

These needs then shaped the platform’s direction over time, changing it from a reporting tool to a complete pentesting platform. 

A Complete Pentesting Platform

When we say ‘complete’, we mean a platform that supports the entire pentesting workflow rather than just one stage of it.

Reporting is still very much a core part of that, but it’s now evolved to help teams manage the processes that happen before, during, and after a test from organising assessments and managing findings to improving collaboration and maintaining visibility throughout the lifecycle of an assessment. 

This means pentesters are no longer forced to treat each stage as a separate task handled across disconnected systems.

Instead, information can flow naturally through the process, allowing them to capture findings and create reports without constantly moving data between different tools. 

The result is over 80% in customer satisfaction, over 33% in customer retention, a 65% decrease in reporting time, and a 29% decrease in repetitive work.

It’s also led to the platform being trusted by some of the world’s leading cybersecurity companies, including Cyber Offsec, Hacksclusive, Risk Associates, Layer8, and more. 

Conclusion

Effectively, by building this platform around continuous customer feedback, Cyver has managed to grow alongside the needs of the industry, and perhaps that was always the plan to drop an initial product that solved a genuine pain point, and then build it organically by being in the space and understanding what more clients needed. 

Whatever the plan was, it’s certainly working, and that can only be considered a triumph considering the evolving threats that we mentioned earlier.

Now more than ever, pentest teams need a fully functioning platform that gives them the structure to manage their work, and Cyver has made sure they’ve got it.