Persistent Purple Teaming Explained: Why Continuous Validation Changes Everything

Ask most security leaders whether their program is working and you will get the same answer: yes. The dashboards are green. The MSSP has not escalated anything. The annual pen test came back with findings they are working through. The compliance audit passed. By every visible indicator, things look fine.

But visible indicators are not the same as validated defenses. That distinction is the entire reason the Persistent Purple Team exists, and it is the question this piece is designed to answer directly: what is Persistent Purple Teaming, how is it different from everything else in your security testing program, and why does continuous validation change what is actually possible for a security operation?

If you are new to Remedium Security and Impetum and want to understand the story behind why we built this, start with Why We Stopped Waiting for the Breach.

▶

What Is Persistent Purple Teaming and How Is It Different from Traditional Security Testing?

Purple teaming, combining red team offensive capabilities with blue team defensive analysis in a collaborative, real-time exercise, is not a new concept. Many mature security organizations run annual purple team exercises. They get their red and blue teams in the same room and work through adversarial tactics together. That is valuable. What it is not is persistent.

Persistent purple teaming means running that cycle continuously, typically monthly, using real-world tactics, techniques, and procedures drawn from active incident response intelligence rather than last year's playbook. The "persistent" part is the differentiator. Our adversaries are persistent. Advanced persistent threats do not pause between your annual exercises. We believe defenders need to match that same level of persistence on the inside.

Sean Martin, co-founder of ITSPmagazine, framed the gap well during our conversation: even just bringing red and blue teams together is one thing. Doing it successfully, with well-defined, measurable, persistent outcomes, is something most organizations have never actually achieved. The Persistent Purple Team is built specifically to make that achievable at scale, regardless of whether an organization already has a red team on staff or is a mid-tier company that has never had one.

Marco Ciappelli, co-founder of ITSPmagazine, captured the underlying logic precisely: your security gets tested either way. The only question is whether you do it first, on your terms, with your team learning from it, or whether the adversary does it for you.

What Is the Difference Between Testing Breadth and Testing Depth?

This is the core distinction that separates what we do from every other testing model in the market. Breadth testing is what most security programs already do well. It covers frameworks, compliance alignment, vulnerability scanning, annual pen tests, and SOC assessments. Organizations that score well on breadth have checked the important boxes.

Depth testing asks a different question: would this specific tool, as it is actually configured in this specific environment, operated by the analysts currently on this team, catch a sophisticated attacker using techniques that are not in last year's playbook? The answer, in our experience across hundreds of engagements, is frequently no, not because the tools are bad, but because nobody has ever tested whether they are configured correctly for the threats that are actually active right now.

A concrete example: tools will log and generate alerts on many attack techniques, but often at a lower or medium severity level that never bubbles up to an actionable alert in the SIEM or meets the threshold for an MSSP to escalate. False negatives, alerts that fire but never reach the right person at the right threshold, are a far bigger operational problem than false positives. The Persistent Purple Team shines a flashlight directly on that gap. We execute real TTPs live within your environment and ask the one question that matters: we can see it. Can you?

What Is the Threat Resilience Score and Why Does It Matter for Board Reporting?

Standard security operations metrics, mean time to detect and mean time to respond, are useful, but they measure what happens after detection. They cannot tell you whether your detection coverage is complete or whether the techniques being actively used against organizations like yours would even trigger an alert in the first place.

The Threat Resilience Score is how we measure and track depth over time. It reflects how well your environment, your tools, your people, your processes, holds up against the real-world attack techniques we test each month. As our co-founder Alex Grohmann notes, the security operations center will tell the CISO everything is fine. The Threat Resilience Score tells the CISO whether that is actually true, and gives them a concrete, improving metric to put in front of a board or CFO instead of a qualitative assurance. Moving from "we believe we are secure" to "here is our score and here is how it has improved over the past six months" is a fundamentally different posture.

How Does Persistent Purple Teaming Work in Practice and What Actually Happens Each Month?

We start with an assessment of where a security operations center actually stands, maturity, coverage, gaps, to establish a baseline Threat Resilience Score. From there, each monthly engagement runs real-world TTPs from our active incident response intelligence against the live environment. We are not running scripted simulations from a tool. We are operating the way a real attacker would, using techniques that are active in the wild right now.

When we find a gap, a detection rule that fires but never escalates, a log source that is not being ingested, a lateral movement path that goes unnoticed, we do not hand you a PDF. We work directly alongside your team to fix it, then verify the fix held. That live, hands-on remediation dynamic is what builds real muscle memory rather than rehearsed playbook responses. Your analysts learn how attacks actually unfold in their environment. Your tools get tuned against real techniques rather than defaults. Your Threat Resilience Score moves in a direction you can measure and report.

The relationship deepens over time in a way that a rotating pen test vendor relationship cannot. We know your environment. We know your team. We know what you fixed last month and what needs attention next. That continuity is itself a security asset, and it is what makes the intelligence we share about what your peers in the industry are facing genuinely actionable rather than generic.

Who Is the Persistent Purple Team Built For?

Marco Ciappelli raised the question directly during the conversation, one that any security leader considering a new partnership would ask: who is this actually for? Are we too big, too small, or already covered by an MSSP? It is a fair question, and the answer is more inclusive than people expect.

The short answer is: any organization that wants to know whether its security program actually works, not just whether it passes an audit. In practice we work primarily with organizations on the more mature end of the spectrum, those already investing seriously in security operations who are looking to elevate further and get the independent validation their internal teams cannot provide for themselves.

For large organizations with existing red teams, we provide the active threat intelligence layer that keeps their internal capability current with real-world techniques. Staying on top of active threats is exhausting work, our co-founder Matt Stewart has been doing it for 23 years. We carry that burden so internal teams can focus on applying the intelligence rather than sourcing it.

For mid-tier organizations that cannot afford a full-time red teamer, and skilled red teamers are genuinely scarce in the market, the Persistent Purple Team provides that capability at a scale and price point that makes continuous expert-led validation accessible without requiring a headcount that the budget and the talent market may not support. The goal we built toward from the beginning: making sure that expert, continuous security validation is not only available to the largest enterprises with the deepest pockets.

Watch the full Brand Story and let us know if you want to connect, we are always open to a conversation with security leaders who are asking the right questions.