By Sila Ozeren Hacioglu, Security Research Engineer at Picus Security.
In many organizations, red and blue teams still work in silos, usually pitted against each other, with the offense priding itself on breaking in and the defense doing what they can to hold the line.
However, too often, their efforts don’t meet in the middle, creating noise. The red team runs an exercise, publishes findings, and moves on, while the blue team is flooded with a sea of unvalidated vulnerability alerts and rules. It may seem like progress, but it’s not. The offense identifies gaps once; the defense fights, essentially blind, day in and day out.
Purple teaming rewrites this equation. It brings red and blue together, not to compete, but to collaborate, turning testing into a shared process and validation into measurable evidence.
The key to making this collaboration far more valuable is Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS), which enables real-time, ongoing, continuous validation.
Because the truth is this: attackers evolve faster than defenses can coordinate, and only through continuous validation can we close the gap.
Purple Teaming Isn’t a Color Wheel, It’s the Key to Real Cyber Defense
Purple teaming isn’t “friendlier red teaming.” It’s a fundamentally more effective workflow, continuously turning every offensive run into a defensive improvement. The workflow goes like this:
Red attacks. They emulate adversaries with precision, revealing where defenses hold or give way.
Blue responds. They trace which controls fire, which stay silent, and why.
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