Purple Team vs Pentest: Which Does Your Org Need First?

Purple team exercises are one of the most effective ways to test whether your security investments actually work — not in theory, but against real adversarial behavior.

By bringing offensive (red) and defensive (blue) teams together in a single collaborative engagement, you get immediate, actionable feedback on detection, response, and prevention. But not every organization is ready for one. In the short video below, we walk through the criteria for determining purple team readiness  and what to do if you’re not quite there yet.

Watch the full conversation

Why readiness matters

A purple team exercise isn’t a starter security assessment. It’s a collaborative engagement that assumes a certain baseline of security maturity — including the people, tooling, and historical context needed to extract meaningful value from the conversation. Jumping into a purple team without that foundation often produces noisy results, frustrated stakeholders, and findings that are hard to operationalize. Before committing, security leaders should evaluate three things: prior testing experience, clearly defined goals, and the specific systems or processes they want to put under the spotlight.

1. Have you been through a pen test before?

The single most important prerequisite is prior penetration testing experience. If your organization has never been through a pen test, a purple team exercise is almost certainly the wrong starting point. Pen tests give you the baseline understanding of where vulnerabilities live, how an attacker might move through your environment, and which controls already perform well. Without that context, you’re trying to collaborate on findings you don’t yet have.

If you’re new to offensive testing, consider a guided pen test instead — a less intensive engagement in which the testing team walks you through their methodology and findings as they go. It’s a natural on-ramp to the kind of real-time dialogue that defines a true purple team engagement.

2. What specifically do you want to learn?

Purple team exercises are only as valuable as the goals you bring to them. Vague objectives produce vague results. Before scoping the engagement, ask: what specific question do we want answered? Some well-scoped examples:

• Validate the security stack. Does your EDR, SIEM, email security, and network tooling actually detect and block the techniques attackers use against organizations like yours?
• Measure SOC responsiveness. How quickly does your in-house SOC — or your third-party MDR provider — detect, escalate, and respond to an active intrusion?
• Stress-test playbooks. How do your incident response procedures hold up under a specific scenario like ransomware, business email compromise, or lateral movement from an initial foothold?

Clear goals also make it easier to evaluate results afterward. “Did our SOC catch the lateral movement within X minutes?” is measurable. “Are we secure?” is not.

3. What’s your next best step if you’re not ready?

If you’ve answered honestly and concluded that a full purple team isn’t the right next step, that’s a useful outcome on its own. The recommended progression is typically: traditional pen test → guided pen test → purple team exercise → continuous adversarial testing. Each stage builds on the lessons of the previous one. Skipping ahead tends to waste budget and erode trust between security and the rest of the business. If you’re unsure where your organization sits on that progression, a short scoping conversation with an experienced offensive security partner is usually the fastest way to find clarity.