When should a business choose a red team engagement instead of a standard penetration test?

Not every organisation needs a red team engagement

A standard penetration test focuses on finding and exploiting vulnerabilities within a defined scope — a web application, an external network, or a specific system. It's thorough, time-boxed, and designed to produce a prioritised list of technical findings with remediation guidance.

A red team engagement is fundamentally different. It simulates a real-world adversary attempting to achieve specific objectives — accessing sensitive data, compromising critical systems, or testing your detection and response capabilities — using any combination of technical, physical, and social engineering techniques.

Choosing between them depends on your organisation's security maturity, your objectives, and what questions you need answered. Getting this wrong means either wasting budget on a red team when you haven't fixed basic vulnerabilities, or missing critical detection gaps because a standard pen test wasn't designed to find them.

Red teaming requires a foundation to test against

Red team engagements are most valuable when your organisation already has mature security controls, a functioning SOC or monitoring capability, and incident response procedures. The point is to test whether those defences work against a determined, skilled adversary — not to find basic vulnerabilities.

If your organisation hasn't addressed the findings from previous penetration tests, a red team engagement will likely succeed quickly by exploiting known weaknesses. This gives you dramatic results but limited new insight. Fix the fundamentals first, then pressure-test your defences.

A good testing provider will be honest about whether you're ready for a red team engagement. If they recommend one without understanding your current posture, that's a red flag in itself.

Indicators that a red team engagement is the right choice

Consider a red team engagement when you want to test detection and response rather than just find vulnerabilities. When your Board asks 'could we detect a sophisticated attacker?' or 'how long would it take to respond?', a pen test cannot answer those questions — but a red team can.

Red teams are also valuable when you need to validate security investments. If you've spent heavily on EDR, SIEM, and SOC capabilities, a red team engagement tells you whether those investments are actually working under realistic attack conditions.

Regulatory frameworks like CBEST, TIBER-EU, and DORA increasingly require threat-led penetration testing that closely resembles red team methodology. If you're subject to these frameworks, red teaming may be a compliance requirement rather than an option.

Match the engagement to the question you need answered

Standard penetration tests find vulnerabilities. Red team engagements test your ability to detect and respond to a realistic attack. Choose based on your maturity level, your objectives, and the questions your leadership needs answered.