The Real Cost of Purple Team Exercises: Why Red and Blue Working Together Still Isn't Standard

What if the biggest gap in your security program isn't a technical control, it's the relationship between your offensive and defensive teams?

I've spent years running penetration tests and security assessments. The technical findings are rarely the real problem. Organizations have tools, they have controls, they have frameworks. What they don't have is a way to close the gap between what their red team discovers and what their blue team acts on. Purple teaming was supposed to fix that. The data says it works: organizations practicing purple team exercises report forty to sixty percent faster threat detection, technique coverage jumping from the thirty-five to forty-five percent range to sixty-five to eighty percent within a year, and three to five times ROI in the first year alone. So why are only twenty-six percent of organizations actually doing it?

The answer isn't complexity. It's the same problem it always is in security: people.

The Collaboration Tax

Purple teaming sounds straightforward in theory. Red shares attack insights mid-engagement. Blue tunes detections and response playbooks in real time. The feedback loop is immediate instead of delayed by weeks while a report gets written, reviewed, and eventually ignored. CyberCX's analysis of over one hundred purple team assessments in Oceania found that customers reported "immense" ROI and used the results to justify additional security funding. One blue team lead put it plainly: "While breaches may be inevitable, major cyber incidents are not." That statement captures exactly why purple team exercises work. When defenders understand how attacks actually succeed, they build better defenses.

But here's what's rarely discussed: running a purple team exercise requires both teams to actually want to collaborate. Not just show up. Want to.

That's harder than it sounds. Red teams have historically operated in secrecy, and for good reason. They're testing whether defenses work, and if blue knows what's coming, the test fails. But that secrecy breeds a competitive dynamic. Red wins by compromising systems. Blue loses when that happens. The incentives are misaligned even when both teams are trying to do the right thing. Add in organizational silos, competing priorities, and the fact that many organizations don't have an internal red team at all (they contract external vendors for pen tests), and you start to see why the collaboration aspect is where purple team initiatives die.

The real cost isn't the exercise itself. It's every hour spent in meetings trying to get red and blue in the same room when they'd rather stay in their respective corners.

The Cultural Barrier Nobody Talks About

Daniel Miessler wrote about purple teaming years ago, and his take remains the most honest I've found. Purple is most valuable as a temporary bridge in organizations where red and blue haven't learned to work together naturally. In mature security programs, healthy red and blue dynamics should make dedicated purple team exercises unnecessary. You get collaboration without the overhead.

But most organizations aren't mature. Most have red teams that withhold techniques because they want to "win," and blue teams that feel defensive when their controls get bypassed. The egos involved are real. I've watched post-exercise debriefs turn into arguments about whose methodology was better instead of what we learned. That's not a tooling problem. That's a culture problem.

What actually works? The organizations that do purple team well share a few patterns, as TechTarget's analysis documents. They start with shared metrics, not "red team findings" versus "blue team detections," but combined measures like mean-time-to-detect and technique coverage against MITRE ATT&CK. They create dedicated coordination roles, sometimes called purple team managers, who facilitate communication without taking sides. And they treat exercises as learning events rather than performance evaluations. That last one matters. If red teams fear their techniques will be used against them in performance reviews, they'll sandbag. If blue teams worry looking bad will cost them budget, they'll hide gaps instead of fixing them.

The practical playbook I've seen work, as KPMG's research confirms: start with tabletop exercises where red and blue discuss threat scenarios together before any technical work happens. Use those sessions to establish shared vocabulary and baseline expectations. Then graduate to assume-breach exercises where red operates but communicates findings in real time instead of waiting for a final report. The key is building the relationship before you need it. Trying to run a collaborative exercise with teams that don't trust each other is worse than not running one at all.

The Maturity Problem

One genuine controversy in purple team discussions, as SentinelOne's explainer notes: whether low-maturity organizations should attempt these exercises at all. The critique is straightforward. If your detection engineering is weak, your telemetry gaps are significant, and your incident response playbooks are untested, a purple team exercise will overwhelm your team and deliver disappointing results. The exercise becomes a mirror showing everything that's broken, and you lack the foundation to act on what you learn.

There's truth in that. I've seen organizations spend significant budget on purple team assessments only to find that the findings pointed to fundamental architectural problems that would take months to remediate. The exercise revealed the need for investment in baseline capabilities rather than advanced collaboration. In those cases, purple team wasn't the right starting point.

But here's the other side: the alternative is continuing with siloed red and blue operations that never close the loop. Periodic penetration tests that produce reports nobody reads. SOC alerts that get triaged without understanding the attacker's methodology. The maturity gap argument assumes organizations will somehow build that foundation without the forcing function that purple team exercises provide. They won't. The compliance checkbox culture doesn't naturally evolve toward real security maturity. Purple team exercises, even imperfect ones, create urgency for the foundational work, as Cymulate's analysis of the differences between red, blue, and purple team approaches explains.

The right framing: purple team exercises are a diagnostic tool. They show you where you are. What you do with that diagnosis depends on your overall security maturity, but skipping the diagnostic because it's inconvenient means you stay blind.

The Automation Question

Part of why purple team adoption is growing is that the market hit roughly USD 1.42 billion in 2024 and projections suggest reaching USD 4.64 billion by 2033. This comes from automation tooling. Breach and Attack Simulation platforms have matured significantly, enabling continuous purple team-style validation without requiring a full-time red team. Tools that automate ATT&CK technique execution and validate detection coverage give organizations the ability to run exercises continuously rather than as point-in-time events.

This matters enormously for resource-constrained teams. The traditional argument against purple team exercises is "we don't have the budget for a dedicated red team." This is being answered by automation. Hybrid approaches that combine periodic manual exercises with continuous BAS validation can achieve most of the benefit at a fraction of the cost. I've seen smaller SOCs use these tools to identify gaps their managed detection and response provider was missing, then use those findings to push for better coverage.

The limitation: automation cannot replicate the strategic thinking of a human adversary. BAS tools test controls against known technique patterns. They don't improvise, adapt to defenses mid-engagement, or pursue objectives the way a motivated attacker would. The value of purple team exercises is not just finding gaps. It's developing the institutional knowledge that comes from watching skilled offensive security professionals work. That experience cannot be fully automated.

The practical recommendation: use automation to scale baseline validation, but invest in periodic human-led exercises for the strategic insights that matter most.

What the Data Actually Shows

The PlexTrac / CyberRisk Alliance survey data that gets cited most often carries an important caveat: the eighty-eight percent effectiveness rating comes from organizations that already adopted purple team exercises. That's a self-selected group. They're not representative of the broader population that has not tried purple teaming. The fifty-two percent effectiveness rating for traditional red and blue exercises does not mean traditional exercises are inadequate. It probably means organizations doing traditional exercises are doing them for compliance purposes, not capability building.

The real insight is not that purple team is dramatically more effective. It's that organizations who invest in collaborative security exercises see better outcomes than those treating red and blue as separate functions with no overlap. The mechanism matters less than the intent. If you're running red team exercises to check a box and blue team operations to meet compliance requirements, you're missing both. If you're running collaborative exercises because you genuinely want to improve your detection and response, the format matters less than the commitment.

That commitment is what's missing in most organizations. Not resources, not tooling, not maturity. The willingness to break down the silos between teams that have operated independently for years and tell them to work together toward a shared goal.

The Path Forward

If you're considering purple team exercises for your organization, here's what I'd suggest starting with: run a single tabletop exercise. Get red and blue in a room. Present a realistic threat scenario. Ask them both how they'd respond. Watch what happens.

If the conversation is productive, you've identified people who can drive collaboration. Build from there. Start with quarterly assumption-breach exercises, establish shared metrics, create visibility into both red findings and blue detections. Use automation to scale validation between exercises.

If the conversation is unproductive, if teams argue about methodology, refuse to share information, or treat the exercise as theater, you've found your real problem. Purple team exercises will not fix an organizational culture that treats collaboration as threat. That's a leadership problem, and it requires leadership solutions.

The real cost of purple team exercises is not the money. It's the organizational honesty required to admit that siloed security operations are not working and that the path to improvement requires genuine collaboration between teams that have spent years competing.

Most organizations are not ready for that conversation. That's why purple team exercises are not standard.