Red Team vs Blue Team vs Purple Team: Choosing the Right Cyber Simulation (A Decision-Maker’s Guide)

Modern cyber risk isn’t just “Are we secure?” It’s: Can we detect what matters, respond fast enough, and prove it under pressure—before a real attacker does? That’s where cyber simulation exercises come in. But “run a red team” is not a strategy. The right approach depends on what you’re trying to achieve: executive confidence, SOC performance, control validation, regulatory pressure, or incident readiness.

This article gives decision makers a practical way to choose between Red Team, Blue Team, and Purple Team simulations—and how to operationalize them so the outcome is measurable risk reduction, not a PDF report.

The three teams in plain executive terms

Red Team (Offense): “Can an attacker get in and achieve impact?”

A red team simulates a real adversary attempting to compromise your environment—often emphasizing stealth, chaining tactics, and business-impact objectives rather than a checklist of vulnerabilities. The goal is to test how far an attacker can go across people, process, and technology. (OffSec)

Best for:

• Testing real-world resilience (including gaps between controls)

• Validating incident response under realistic conditions

• Board-level assurance around “what could actually happen”

Common outputs:

• Attack paths to crown jewels

• Time-to-compromise and time-to-detect

• Evidence of control breakdowns

Pitfall to avoid: Treating it as a “one-and-done” annual event that produces lessons you never turn into detection engineering or process change.

Blue Team (Defense): “Can we detect, contain, and recover—consistently?”

A blue team exercise focuses on the defensive side: monitoring, detection, triage, containment, eradication, and recovery. Depending on scope, it can resemble an incident response drill, threat hunting sprint, or control validation event. (Cymulate)

Best for:

• SOC and IR muscle memory

• Improving alert quality and playbooks

• Validating tooling (SIEM/EDR/SOAR), logging coverage, and escalation paths

Common outputs:

• Improved detection logic and tuned alerting

• Faster triage and better handoffs

• Updated playbooks and runbooks

Pitfall to avoid: Running defensive drills without credible adversary behavior—your team gets better at the “known routine,” not the attack patterns that are actually hurting peers in your sector.

Purple Team (Collaborative): “Can we turn attacks into better detection—fast?”

A purple team exercise is a structured collaboration between red and blue. The defining feature is real-time sharing and iteration: the attacker shows what they did (or plans to do), and the defenders immediately validate visibility, detections, and response—then improve and retest. Cisco’s “RED + BLUE = PURPLE” framing captures the intent: aligned goals and information sharing. (optiv.com)

Best for:

• Rapid detection engineering improvements

• Validating coverage against specific attacker TTPs (e.g., MITRE ATT&CK techniques)

• Building a measurable program (repeatable exercises, trending results)

Common outputs:

• A prioritized backlog of detection gaps

• Instrumentation/logging improvements

• Retested, verified detections (not theoretical)

Pitfall to avoid: Calling something “purple teaming” when it’s really just a red team report and a separate blue team meeting a month later.

A decision framework CISOs/CTOs/CEOs can use

Choose Red Team when the business question is…

• “What’s our real breach path to critical assets?”

• “Would we notice an advanced attacker before they cause damage?”

• “Can our IR process handle stealthy, multi-stage intrusion?” (OffSec)

Trigger conditions:

• High-value IP/data, regulated workloads, or high extortion exposure

• Board pressure after peer breaches

• M&A, major cloud migration, or new identity architecture

Choose Blue Team when the business question is…

• “Are we operationally ready—today?”

• “Are our detections actionable and our response consistent?”

• “Do we have the right logs and playbooks to move quickly?” (Cymulate)

Trigger conditions:

• New SOC (internal or outsourced)

• Tooling changes (new SIEM/EDR), new MDR provider, or new escalation model

• Repeated false positives / alert fatigue

Choose Purple Team when the business question is…

• “How do we improve fastest with the least waste?”

• “Can we validate and increase detection coverage against real attacker behaviors?”

• “Can we prove continuous improvement quarter over quarter?” (optiv.com)

Trigger conditions:

• You want repeatable, measurable progress (not just findings)

• You’re building a detection engineering program

• You need to demonstrate maturity to auditors/customers

What to measure so simulations translate into risk reduction

If you don’t measure outcomes, the exercise becomes theater. Strong programs track:

• Time-to-detect (TTD) and time-to-respond (TTR) for simulated attack steps

• Detection coverage mapped to high-risk TTPs (and the % that are validated, not assumed)

• Control efficacy: prevention vs detection vs response gaps

• Repeatability: did the same technique succeed again next quarter? (If yes, your process didn’t learn.)

A practical simulation roadmap (what many mature orgs do)

1. Start with Blue Team readiness (logging, alerting, escalation, playbooks)

2. Run Purple Team cycles monthly/quarterly to build validated detection coverage

3. Run Red Team annually (or after major change) to test full-chain realism and business impact

4. After each event: turn findings into tickets, assign owners, retest, and trend progress

This approach avoids the classic trap: a great red team report that becomes “security shelfware.”

CTO lens: where cyber simulations intersect architecture decisions

CTOs often inherit security risk through design choices: identity, network segmentation, SaaS sprawl, secrets management, and cloud posture. The CTO-specific value of simulations is architectural feedback you can act on quickly:

• Identity attack paths (token theft, privilege escalation, lateral movement)

• Segmentation reality checks (is it enforced or just diagrammed?)

• Logging-by-design (can you actually observe critical control points?)

Armour Cybersecurity: how a CTO can use their services for simulation exercises

Armour Cybersecurity positions itself as an end-to-end provider for building cyber resilience (Armour Cybersecurity) and offers penetration testing / ethical hacking that involves simulated cyber attacks across infrastructure, applications, and interfaces to identify vulnerabilities and weaknesses with actionable outcomes (Armour Cybersecurity). Armour also publishes case-driven examples of conducting penetration testing using multidisciplinary ethical hackers and structured phases (e.g., initial vulnerability scanning and assessment) (Armour Cybersecurity).

How a CTO can apply that to cyber simulation exercises:

• Use targeted simulation (app + identity + cloud control points) before major releases or migrations

• Convert results into an engineering backlog: hardening, detection hooks, privileged access redesign

• Pair simulation outcomes with operational improvements (alerts, playbooks) to avoid “fix the vuln, ignore the detection gap” bias

Important note on titles: Armour Cybersecurity’s public “leadership team” page highlights executive roles (e.g., CEO/COO/CSO) (Armour Cybersecurity), but a CTO title is not clearly published there. So rather than guessing a name, treat “CTO lens” as the responsibilities and decisions a CTO must drive using simulation outputs.

FAQ

Is purple teaming better than red teaming?

Not universally. Purple teaming is usually the fastest way to improve detections and response through real-time collaboration (optiv.com), while red teaming is best for testing full-chain realism and business impact.

How often should we run these exercises?

Common pattern: purple team quarterly (or monthly for high-maturity teams), blue team drills more frequently, and red team annually or after major architectural change.

What should executives ask for as deliverables?

Validated detection gaps, time-to-detect/time-to-respond metrics, a prioritized backlog with owners, and proof of retesting/closure—so results translate into reduced risk.