An Association is preparing to upgrade their firewalls at five locations around the United States. Each of the three vendor's RFP responses is in-line with the security and other requirements. Which…

Question

Options

• ACorrelate current industry research with the RFP responses to ensure validity.
• BCreate a lab environment to evaluate each of the three firewall platforms.
• CBenchmark each firewall platform's capabilities and experiences with similar sized companies.
• DDevelop criteria and rate each firewall platform based on information in the RFP responses.

• A
  7% (2)
• B
  73% (22)
• C
  17% (5)
• D
  3% (1)

Explanation

When all three vendors satisfy the documented requirements on paper, hands-on lab testing is the most reliable way to differentiate them. A lab environment lets you verify actual throughput, latency, management interface usability, failover behavior, rule complexity handling, and integration with existing infrastructure under realistic conditions. RFP responses are vendor-supplied marketing documents that may overstate capabilities; correlating with industry research (A) and benchmarking with similar companies (C) provide useful context but lack direct applicability to your specific environment; rating based solely on RFP content (D) doesn't test real-world performance. Lab evaluation produces empirical, environment-specific data that cannot be obtained any other way.

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