A single data breach now costs United States organizations an average of $10.22 million, a record high according to the IBM 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report. The global average cost of a breach fell to $4.44 million, the first decline in five years. Healthcare organizations face a steeper bill: the average healthcare breach cost dropped $2.35 million year-over-year to $7.42 million, still the most expensive sector in the study. Detection and containment also remain slow: the average breach lifecycle fell to 241 days, a record low.
Those numbers point to a gap between what security teams believe is working and what actually stops an attacker. Purple team cybersecurity closes that gap. A purple team exercise pairs offensive testers with defensive analysts in the same room, testing one technique at a time and confirming, in real time, whether monitoring tools catch it. This differs sharply from a standard penetration test, where an external team attacks quietly and delivers a report afterward. Leaders at small and midsize businesses in regulated industries increasingly ask which approach fits their stage of security maturity. The honest answer: purple teaming earns its value once basic detection capability already exists, not before.
What Is a Purple Team?
A purple team is not a standing department with its own staff and budget line. It describes a collaborative exercise where offensive testers and defensive analysts work the same engagement together instead of separately. Red teams emulate attackers to find exploitable weaknesses. Blue teams operate the detection and response stack that should catch those attacks. Purple teams structure the collaboration between the two so each engagement produces measurable improvements in detection coverage and response time.
The federal government has formally defined both halves of this model. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) describes a red team as a group of people authorized and organized to emulate a potential adversary's attack or exploitation capabilities against an enterprise's security posture, with an objective to improve enterprise security by demonstrating the impacts of successful attacks and what works for the defenders. The companion blue team carries the opposite mandate: the group responsible for defending an enterprise's use of information systems by maintaining its security posture against a group of mock attackers. Purple teaming puts those two functions in direct, immediate conversation rather than letting a report serve as the only connection between them.
How Purple Team Cybersecurity Differs From a Standard Penetration Test
A standard penetration test runs on a fixed schedule, typically covering a defined set of systems over a few days, and ends with a findings report delivered after testing concludes. The tester rarely interacts with internal security staff during the engagement, and detection is not usually the primary measurement. Federal guidance draws a clear line here: penetration testing may be largely laboratory-based, while organizations use red team exercises to provide more comprehensive assessments that reflect real-world conditions.
Purple teaming sits apart from both approaches. Instead of a one-way attack followed by a report, the red team shares attack methods with the blue team in real time so defenders can immediately adjust. Purple teaming creates a fast feedback loop: if the blue team misses something, both sides pause, discuss, and tweak defenses on the spot. A standard penetration test answers “what can an attacker get into.” A purple team cyber exercise answers a different, often more useful question: “would the security team have noticed.”
The distinction matters for how each exercise gets used:
- A penetration test satisfies a compliance checkbox and produces evidence for an auditor or enterprise customer.
- A purple team exercise trains the internal security operations staff and tunes detection rules against specific techniques.
- A penetration test is typically outsourced start to finish, while a purple team session often blends an outside red team with internal defenders.
Atomic Red Team and the Rise of Continuous Testing
Most purple team work today runs against a shared technique catalogue rather than an open-ended attack simulation. Atomic Red Team, an open source project maintained by Red Canary, is a collection of scripts that test how organizations might detect techniques mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. That framework functions as a globally accessible knowledge base of adversary tactics and techniques based on real-world observations.
Any security team can use these open source tools to emulate known attacker techniques and test its own defenses. Atomic Red Team is community maintained, which makes it a practical starting point for smaller security teams without a dedicated offensive testing budget. Running a handful of atomic tests against logging and alerting tools gives an internal technology team a quick read on whether its detection stack actually fires, well before any outside red team gets involved. Small teams, and those mainly focused on defense, can get real benefit from this kind of testing even without access to a dedicated red team.
When Is an SMB Ready for Purple Teaming?
Purple teaming delivers the most value once a company already runs a functioning detection program: logging, alerting, and a person or managed provider watching for anomalies. Running a purple team exercise before that foundation exists wastes the engagement, because there is little for the blue team to tune. A company still closing basic gaps, such as multi-factor authentication or patch management, generally gets more benefit from a straightforward vulnerability assessment first.
A few signals tend to indicate a company has outgrown a standard penetration test and is ready for collaborative testing:
- An internal or outsourced security operations function already monitors alerts on a regular basis.
- Previous penetration tests keep surfacing the same categories of findings without improving detection.
- The company has adopted a security information and event management tool or managed detection service and wants evidence it actually works against real techniques.
- Leadership wants the security team trained against specific attacker methods, not just a list of vulnerabilities.
Regulated industries add another layer to this decision. Defense contractors working toward Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) face a split obligation by level. Only CMMC Level 3 names penetration testing directly, requiring it at least annually or when significant security changes are made to the system, under the CMMC program rule published at 32 CFR Part 170. Level 2, built on the 110 controls in NIST SP 800-171, does not use the term, but most experts urge Level 2 firms that handle sensitive defense data to test anyway. Purple teaming offers those contractors a way to validate controls against mapped attacker techniques well ahead of a formal assessment.
Technology and SaaS companies pursuing SOC 2 face a similar pattern: the Trust Services Criteria use the words penetration testing exactly once, in a point of focus rather than a criterion, and the governing body is explicit that use of the criteria does not require an assessment of whether each point of focus is addressed. In practice, auditors and enterprise buyers still expect recent test evidence, and a purple team engagement produces a stronger story than a scan alone. Healthcare organizations carry their own ongoing obligation: the HIPAA Security Rule at 45 CFR 164.308(a)(8) calls for a periodic technical and nontechnical evaluation, based initially upon the standards implemented under the rule and subsequently in response to environmental or operational changes affecting the security of electronic protected health information. A purple team cycle gives a covered entity current, technique-level evidence for that evaluation rather than a generic scan report.
Moving From Testing in Isolation to Testing Together
Purple teaming earns its place once a company has moved past basic security hygiene and needs proof that its detection program actually works against real attacker techniques. A standard penetration test still answers a different, equally necessary question about exploitable weaknesses. Choosing between the two, or sequencing them correctly, depends on an honest read of current security maturity rather than a generic checklist.
Planet 9 is a Bay Area cybersecurity consulting firm specializing in SOC 2, HIPAA, and CMMC readiness for SMBs in healthcare, SaaS, and technology. Our vCISOs and compliance managers help organizations choose the right approach, configure GRC tools if needed, and get audit-ready without wasted time.
