INSIGHT

How Purple Teaming Improves Mean Time to Detect and Respond

Jon Parrish, Josh Schmidt • November 12, 2026

Services: Purple Teaming

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You may have security tools designed to identify suspicious activity and alert your team when something is wrong. Even with those tools in place, you may not know how quickly you’ll detect an attack, whether the right alerts will fire, or how effectively your team will respond. Purple teaming gives you a controlled way to answer those questions.

By bringing offensive and defensive security efforts together, purple team exercises can test your detection and response capabilities against realistic attacker behavior. The results can help you identify weaknesses, refine your processes, and improve two important measures of security performance: mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR). 

What Are Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) & Mean Time to Respond (MTTR)? 

Mean time to detect measures the average amount of time between the beginning of malicious activity and its detection. Mean time to respond generally measures how quickly your security team responds after detecting an incident, although the endpoint may be defined as containment, remediation, resolution, or recovery. Establishing a consistent definition internally is important when you’re tracking changes over time. 

Together, these metrics can tell you how effectively your organization moves from malicious activity to detection and then from detection to action. Long detection times give attackers a larger window to operate without being noticed, while delays in response can give an identified threat additional time to cause damage. Tracking MTTD and MTTR as part of cybersecurity risk management can also help you look beyond whether you have the right security tools in place and examine what happens when your tools, processes, and people encounter the activity they were designed to identify.

How Purple Teaming Tests Detection & Response Capabilities 

Purple teaming brings offensive and defensive security functions together in a collaborative exercise. The offensive side emulates adversary behaviors while the defensive side evaluates whether your telemetry, alerts, and analysts detect them. Your team can then tune its defenses and retest them to see whether those changes worked. 

That feedback loop can reveal weaknesses that may otherwise remain hidden. You may discover that a security tool is configured incorrectly, an expected alert does not fire, or analysts receive an alert without enough useful information to investigate it efficiently. Controlled testing helps you uncover and address these gaps before similar activity occurs during an incident. 

How Do You Know if Your SIEM Is Actually Detecting the Threats It Should? 

If you recently implemented a new security information and event management (SIEM) platform or another security alerting technology, you may want to know whether you’re getting the detection capabilities you expected. The product or service may promise visibility into specific types of activity, but you still need to verify that those capabilities work as intended within your environment. Through controlled attack simulations, your security team or security operations center can verify whether the expected visibility and alerts appear.

Reducing Mean Time to Detect Through Purple Teaming 

Lowering MTTD starts with understanding what your organization can and cannot see. Monitoring coverage, alert quality, and how well detection rules correspond to attacker behavior can all affect how quickly your team identifies malicious activity. Purple team exercises let you evaluate that visibility against specific attacker behaviors. If an emulated technique does not generate the expected telemetry or alert, you’ve identified a detection gap that needs further investigation. If an alert does fire, you can assess whether it contains enough useful information for an analyst to quickly recognize what is happening. 

You can also focus purple team testing on relevant adversary tactics, techniques, and procedures. Exercises can map these behaviors to MITRE ATT&CK, giving your security team a consistent way to evaluate detection coverage. Your monitoring environment can change as systems, configurations, and security tools change. Regular exercises can help you determine whether existing controls continue to identify the behaviors they were designed to catch and uncover gaps that emerge along the way. 

Improving Mean Time to Respond Through Purple Teaming 

Once your team detects suspicious activity, response time becomes a critical measure of how well you prepare for a cyberattack. Analysts need to understand what happened and determine what action to take. During a purple team exercise, you can examine what happens after malicious activity is detected. Do your alerts give analysts useful information? Can they interpret the activity efficiently? Do your existing processes allow them to move from investigation to action without unnecessary delays? 

The exercise can also reveal where your response slows down. Your team can evaluate how alerts are investigated and escalated, how established response procedures work in practice, and how effectively people coordinate when action is required. You can then use those findings to refine your processes and address specific sources of delay. Repeated exercises also expose your defenders to specific attack techniques in a controlled setting. Your team can use that experience to identify processes, tools, or responsibilities that need clarification and become more familiar with how to respond to the malicious behaviors being tested. 

Measuring the Effectiveness of Purple Teaming 

MTTD and MTTR can provide useful benchmarks for evaluating your defensive performance from one exercise to the next, especially when you define each metric consistently. Depending on what you want to test, you may evaluate areas such as: 

• Time between emulated malicious activity and detection 
• Time between detection and defensive action 
• Whether expected alerts were generated 
• Which tested behaviors were successfully detected 
• Where detection or response gaps were identified 
• Whether changes made after an exercise produced better results during retesting 

Purple teaming’s iterative approach can make these measurements particularly useful. Your team can emulate an attack technique, observe the defensive response, make adjustments, and retest to determine whether those changes produced better results. By tracking results across exercises, you can identify which changes are strengthening detection and response and which gaps remain unresolved. 

Building a More Resilient Security Program 

You should have confidence that your security investments will perform as expected before an attacker puts them to the test. Purple teaming offers a practical method for validating your security controls, uncovering gaps, and determining where detection and response times can be improved. 

BPM’s Purple Teaming Services can help you evaluate your cybersecurity defenses through testing designed to uncover gaps in detection, visibility, and response. Findings from those exercises can guide targeted changes that strengthen how your team identifies suspicious activity and responds when an incident occurs.