Red team
An adversarial exercise testing whether your detection and response can catch a determined attacker pursuing a specific objective.
A red team engagement is goal-driven and stealthy. Rather than enumerating vulnerabilities, the team picks an objective such as reaching the payroll system and tries to get there without being caught.
It tests people and process as much as technology, and it only makes sense once you have detection worth testing. Running one against an environment with no monitoring simply proves the obvious.
Where this comes up
Red team sits inside our penetration testing work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.