Introduction
Companies engage in various forms of the decision-making process to implement a plan of action. Successful corporations have a layout of operations that involve identifying the problem to be addressed, analyzing the situation, and acquiring relevant. The process also involves identifying alternatives, choosing the best solution, taking action, and appraising the decision and concerns. The decision-making process may lead to quick decisions that are ill-formed due to factors such as culture; experiences, groupthink, and biases (Brummer and Valerie, 2015) Organizations can use various tools to mitigate the adverse effects of such elements. Red teaming is one of the effective methods that can be used to enhance the quality, aptness, and significance of decision-making.
How Red Teaming Helps Improve Decisions
Red teaming could be considered as a decision-making model enabling managers and leaders in an organization with a sovereign capacity to wholly explore alternatives in concepts to increase profits by minimizing risks. This tool identifies strengths, weaknesses, prospects, and threats when proposing alternate approaches or testing a plan. Organizations will always be vulnerable to attacks, no matter how well they protect themselves against them. Red teaming grants organization the ability to predict threats, prepare for possible attacks and minimize the effects of the attacks when they occur. For example, a bank could use red teaming to predict potential areas where fraud could occur. Consequently, the bank will put in necessary precautions to reduce the probability of the threat.
The strategy enables organizations to implement preventive protection measures and develop organizational resilience. To be resilient, organizations must gather adequate information on existing and possible risks and draw the right conclusion from them. The company should also develop applicable technical and security measures besides ensuring their effectiveness in the long run. It should also recognize the effect of intellectual and social features on the process of making decisions.
Red teaming facilitates quality and relevant decision-making by assessing the company’s ability to identify, react, and prevent complex threats sent by the opponent. Besides finding the loopholes in defense of the company, this strategy continues to provide a playbook to enhance the forthcoming protection. The strategy also comprises all-inclusive testing of the company’s technical landscape and thoroughly testing the employees and physical security controls. The needs of the company will determine how the red team will look like its roles, when actions should be implemented, and its category.
The strategy ensures effective decision-making because it ensures that members of the red team have practical oral and written communication skills. The team thinks critically and challenges other workers through tools and approaches that enable them to explore different perspectives. The red team is also skilled and educated to recognize predispositions and think critically in the face of a challenge. According to Scott (2020, 100), for red teaming to be effective, the management of the company should create the appropriate conditions such as being open to new ideas and accepting disapproval. The team should also be supported and provided with clear objectives. The team should focus on critical issues and thinks in terms of quality and not quantity. Red teams help promote quality decision-making by assisting organizations in identifying threats and weaknesses. It is preventive methods that can help organizations avoid huge losses. The advantage of the red team is that it could be applied in different contexts. Red teaming assists teams avoid biases in decisions through role acting.
Applying Red Teaming
Red teaming can be applied realistically by organizations to uncover hidden risks that may threaten a company’s profitability or operations. The red team compliments traditional penetration tests but is more comprehensive in scope because it covers more areas of potential risks. For example, it can uncover phone-based and Email threats through social engineering to identify open threats. It could also be applied to prevent network exploitation, giving third parties access to sensitive information from networks. Red teaming could be applied to cover different elements of an organization. Despite the application type, the process follows the attributes of reconnaissance, attack, and enumeration. A company must first carry out an assessment test involving key stakeholders to establish the need for a red team and the concerns it should address. The assessment should estimate the potential damage that could be caused by reputational damage or loss of revenue due to breach of customer confidentiality or service downtimes (Young 2020). Secondly, the need for a red team is justified by the existence of a universal infrastructure that could affect the whole organization’s functioning. The infrastructure assessment should include both the software and hardware infrastructures.
A practical application of the red team could be illustrated through the example of dealing with cybersecurity. Many companies today depend on computer networks that are prone to cyber-related attacks. Current cybercriminals have combined advanced hacking methods with traditional techniques. A cyber-attack could sabotage the operations of an organization as well as access to critical information (Matherl 2020). For example, an assessment based on the three identified elements could single out phishing as the most probable avenue for a cyber-attack. Today’s cybercriminals follow a systematic approach rather than force to establish the weak link in an organization and penetrate the organization. The process of assessment should establish the weak link within the lines of defense and enact protective measures
In this case, the organization should establish three types of teams to make the red team work realistically. The first team should be the red team that acts in the place of cybercriminals and attempts to break the various defense parameters of the organization (Zenko 2015). The organization should provide the red team with the required resources to carry out their attacks. The second team is the blue team that acts as the IT staff of the organization. The role of the blue team is to prevent attacks launched by the red team.
Conclusion
Red teaming might improve team effectiveness by uncovering hidden risks that threaten a company’s profitability.The red team that also acts in the place of cybercriminals and can be applied to cover different elements of an organization. The red team can also be used to avoid physical exploitation cases when people breach security rules to avoid confrontations. For example, people in an office often open doors to third parties without badges because they are unwilling to enquire about their access credentials. The red team should assess and understand the broad overview of the organization’s security infrastructures and cyber risks to improve its mission. The assessment will assist the red team to mentally establish potential weak areas where they could launch cyber-attacks. Red teaming will identify these risks and team members could suggest possible solutions. For example, the use of biometrics could prevent the risk of people giving strangers access to the premises.
Bibliography
Brummer, Klaus, and Valerie M. Hudson, eds. Foreign policy analysis beyond North America. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Incorporated, 2015.
Matherly, Maj Carter. “The Group Psychology of Red Teaming.” military learning (2020): 29.
Scott, Benjamin Fraser. “Red teaming financial crime risks in the banking sector.” Journal of Financial Crime (2020).
Young, Jacob A. “The Development of a Red Teaming Service-Learning Course.” Journal of Information Systems Education 31, no. 3 (2020): 157-178.
Zenko, Micah. Red Team: How to succeed by thinking like the enemy. Basic Books, 2015.