Red vs. Purple Teaming: How Should Security Leaders Decide Which Approach Delivers More Value?

Security leaders face a critical choice between red and purple teaming to advance their organization’s defenses. Red teaming offers adversarial rigor for mature programs, while purple teaming delivers collaborative, continuous improvement, each aligning with different stages of security maturity and business outcomes.

This guide helps leaders understand how adversary simulation, detection engineering, and threat-informed defense influence the choice between red and purple teaming.

Why Does the Red vs. Purple Teaming Decision Matter for Security Leaders?

Security leaders must ensure their testing strategies deliver measurable value. The choice between red and purple teaming is more than technical—it’s about aligning security investments with organizational maturity, compliance, and business outcomes.

What Is Red Teaming and When Is It the Right Choice?

Red team engagements often leverage the MITRE ATT&CK framework to emulate real-world adversary behaviors and map detection gaps. For organizations adopting a threat-informed defense strategy, ATT&CK alignment provides a standardized way to understand coverage and prioritize investments.

Security Programs

Red teaming simulates real-world attacks using the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of advanced adversaries. This approach:

• Tests detection, response, and resilience under realistic conditions
• Uncovers hidden vulnerabilities and process gaps
• Is best suited for organizations with established security operations and incident response

Benefits:

• Realistic assessment of defenses
• Executive-level reporting on vulnerabilities and resilience
• Drives investment in critical controls

Limitations:

• Resource-intensive and potentially disruptive
• May not foster knowledge transfer if blue teams are not engaged

Red teaming may include both adversary simulation (goal-based testing) and adversary emulation (recreating specific threat actor TTPs). This distinction helps leaders determine whether they need a scenario-driven exercise or one based on replicating a real-world adversary.

What Is Purple Teaming and When Does It Provide More Value?

Purple teaming is built around detection engineering and visibility gap analysis. Exercises help SOC teams tune SIEM/SOAR rules, validate log coverage, and align detections to ATT&CK techniques, accelerating overall SOC maturity.

Purple teaming bridges the gap between red (offense) and blue (defense) teams. In a purple team exercise:

• Both teams work together in real time
• Focus is on detection engineering, tuning, and knowledge transfer
• Exercises are iterative, with immediate feedback and learning

Benefits:

• Accelerates detection and response maturity
• Reduces false positives and improves SIEM effectiveness
• Fosters a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement

Limitations:

• Less adversarial rigor than pure red teaming
• Requires buy-in and participation from both teams

How Should Leaders Choose Between Red and Purple Teaming?

Organizations following a threat-informed defense lifecycle, first mapping threats, then validating controls, and finally improving detections, tend to start with purple teaming and advance to red teaming as maturity grows.

When Red Teaming Is the Better Fit

• Best for high-maturity security programs
• Designed to stress-test resilience and identify hidden vulnerabilities
• Ideal for organizations with advanced compliance requirements
• Requires more resources and technical staffing
• If operational impact during testing is acceptable

When Purple Teaming Is the Better Fit

Ideal for low- to medium-maturity programs

• Focuses on building detection capabilities and knowledge sharing
• Supports foundational and iterative improvement
• Works well with moderate resources
• Designed to operate with minimal business disruption

Where Does Your Organization Fit on the Security Maturity Model?

• Early Stage: Focus on foundational controls, basic detection, and response. Purple teaming accelerates learning and process development.
• Developing: Begin integrating adversary simulation and detection engineering. Purple teaming remains valuable.
• Mature: Test advanced detection and response with red teaming. Use findings to inform further purple team cycles.

What Steps Should Security Leaders Take to Get Started?

• Assess your current security maturity and goals
• Identify key stakeholders (security, IT, compliance)
• Choose an approach aligned with your needs
• Define success metrics (e.g., detection rates, response times)
• Schedule regular reviews and iterate based on findings

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What’s the core difference between red and purple teaming?

A: Red teaming focuses on simulating real-world attackers to test how well your defenses hold up under pressure. It measures your ability to detect and respond to advanced threats. Purple teaming, on the other hand, is collaborative and aims to improve both offense and defense simultaneously. It provides immediate feedback, helping teams tune detections, strengthen processes, and build long-term capability.

Q: When is red teaming worth the investment?

A: Red teaming is most valuable when your organization has mature controls and wants a rigorous, holistic assessment of resilience. If you’ve already invested in detection and response, red teaming validates readiness, uncovers blind spots, and provides high-value executive insights. It’s also ideal when preparing for regulatory reviews, cyber insurance assessments, or demonstrating resilience to the board.

Q: What advantages does adversary simulation provide beyond traditional testing?

A: Adversary simulation goes beyond vulnerability scanning by reproducing real attack sequences, human decision-making, and adaptive tactics. This helps organizations identify chained vulnerabilities, test process weaknesses, and observe how well teams coordinate under real-world conditions. It also supports strategic planning by highlighting where critical investments will drive the greatest threat reduction.

Q: How do purple team exercises help enterprises improve faster?

A: Purple teaming accelerates detection engineering by pairing offensive insights with defensive tuning in real time. Teams quickly identify where alerts are missing, rules need refinement, or tools require configuration changes. This approach reduces false positives, improves SOC efficiency, strengthens team skill sets, and creates a continuous improvement cycle that builds long-term detection maturity.

What’s the Best Next Step for Advancing Your Security Testing Strategy?

Choosing between red and purple teaming is about aligning your security investments with your organization’s maturity and business goals. Evaluate your success metrics, use maturity models to guide your choice, and revisit your approach as your program evolves. 

Ready to advance your security strategy?

Contact TrustedSec to discuss a tailored adversary simulation or purple team engagement.