When you’re ready for purple teaming¶

Purple teaming requires certain foundational capabilities. Starting too early wastes effort and causes frustration.

Prerequisites¶

Red team capability: Need someone who can simulate attacks realistically. Doesn’t require elite hackers but does need understanding of adversary TTPs and ability to operate safely.

Blue team capability: Need monitoring, detection, and incident response foundations. Can’t validate detections that don’t exist or test responses without procedures.

Willing participants: Both sides must want to collaborate. Adversarial red team or defensive blue team that views testing as criticism won’t produce useful outcomes.

Executive support: Purple teaming takes time and resources. Leadership must understand value and accept that exercises will reveal uncomfortable gaps.

Safe environment: Need ability to test without breaking production. Isolated test environments or very controlled production testing with safety limits.

You’re not ready if¶

No logging or monitoring: Can’t run purple team exercises if blue team is blind. Build visibility first.

No incident response capability: If blue team doesn’t have procedures for responding to detected threats, purple teaming reveals problems but can’t help fix them.

Purely compliance-driven: If security exists only to check regulatory boxes, purple teaming’s honest assessment of real defensive effectiveness won’t align with compliance theatre.

No time or resources: Purple team exercises require planning, execution time, and follow-through on findings. Half-hearted efforts waste everyone’s time.

Adversarial culture: If red team views blue team as incompetent or blue team views red team as annoying, collaboration fails. Fix culture before attempting purple teaming.

You’re ready when¶

Basic visibility exists: Centralised logging, endpoint monitoring, network traffic visibility. Doesn’t need to be perfect but must exist.

Someone owns defence: Clear responsibility for monitoring, detection, and response. Even small teams can designate an owner.

Curiosity about effectiveness: Genuine interest in “do our defences actually work?” Not defensive about discovering gaps.

Ability to act on findings: Can allocate time and resources to implement improvements discovered through purple teaming.

Psychological safety: Teams can discuss failures and gaps without blame. Learning mindset over perfection mindset.