The Reason Penetration Testing Should Come First
Penetration testing is the bedrock of any mature security program. It’s a structured, scoped evaluation of known vulnerabilities and common misconfigurations across your infrastructure, applications, and systems.
If you’re not regularly doing thorough pentests (and fixing what’s found) you’re not ready for red teaming. Why?
Because red teaming assumes a certain baseline level of security hygiene. It’s not designed to uncover low-hanging fruit or known CVEs. If those still exist in your environment, that’s where you should start. Otherwise, your red team engagement risks turning into a very expensive vulnerability scan.
Red Teaming Is About Testing Defences
The core value of a red team exercise isn’t just the breach, it’s what happens after. How quickly is the threat detected? How does your security team respond? Are there any alerts? Are logs correlated properly? Does the incident response get triggered and is it effective?
That means red teaming only makes sense if you have a so called blue team, or at least some kind of SOC, MDR provider, or internal security monitoring capabilities. Without defenders in place, you’re not testing resilience, you’re just building a report.
A Checklist For When You're Ready
You might be ready to bring in red team operations if:
✅ You perform regular, high-quality penetration tests and remediate findings quickly.
✅ You have active security monitoring, alerting, and incident response capabilities.
✅ You’re trying to test your real-world readiness against advanced adversaries or ransomware attacks.
✅ You want to validate the effectiveness of detection tools like your SIEM, EDR, IDS.
✅ You’ve communicated internally about the nature and goals of red teaming.
How Red Teaming Complements Pentesting
Think of it like this:
- Pentesting finds doors and windows left open, whereas
- Red Teaming tests how well you respond when someone gets through anyway.
Both are vital, but they serve different purposes.
How We Can Help
At OSM Solutions, we offer both services, and we help you decide when to use which.
- New to testing: Start with a scoped penetration test tailored to your assets.
- Want to level up your resilience: Our red team engagements simulate real-world attackers, from initial foothold to lateral movement, while coordinating with your control team to deliver maximum value.
- Need help on the defense side too: We can assist in building or improving your blue team capabilities, including detection tuning and incident response.
Final Thoughts
Red teaming isn’t a checkbox or a trophy, it’s a strategic capability that makes sense at the right time. Start with strong foundations, grow your defenses, then test them like it’s real!