Enhancing your team’s cyber preparedness through various realistic simulated cyber exercises is one of the most effective practices for organizations worldwide.
Because the threat keeps changing, so does what teams need to practise against, which is what a simulated environment is for. The buying decision, though, is less straightforward than the case for training itself.
It has more moving parts than a feature comparison suggests: what you need the range to achieve, how it is delivered and hosted, what it costs to run rather than to license, and who you buy it from. What follows works through those in the order a buyer tends to meet them.
Let’s Start With Definitions: What Is a Cyber Range?
A cyber range is a controlled, simulated environment built from virtualized networks, systems and tooling, where teams can train and test incident response without touching production. What differs between them, and what drives the price, is how much of that environment you get, how closely it can be made to resemble your own, and how much of it you can run yourself.
Typically, organizations worldwide use this technology for the following:
· Practising under attack conditions.
A cyber range is a place, both virtual and physical, where teams rehearse against live attack. It can be used by organizations to assess preparedness for an attack or as a practice field for people looking to get into the cybersecurity field.
· Safe training environment.
This environment allows organizations to practice their skills and simulate attacks on how to best detect, respond to, and prevent cyber incidents in a safe environment without causing any real-life damage.
· Testing and R&D purposes.
A cyber range not only provides the means for simulating real-life scenarios but can be used as a tool for security or technology testing and for research and development activities.
While the concept of cyber range seems relatively straightforward, it is a complex system that comprises both technical and organizational elements.
Let’s have a look at the best practices and factors to consider when purchasing a cyber range technology for your organization.
Step 1. Understand and Draw up Your Business Requirements
In case you have already concluded that your organization needs to buy a cyber range, the first step that you must take is to establish a clear understanding of what you will use it for.
It is a good idea to take a step back and focus on the intended impact of the upcoming investment. Try to answer the following questions:
· What should the ideal outcome look like after using the cyber range for a while?
· How many people (and who) should be participating in the training that will take place in the cyber range?
· What should the participants learn and prepare for?
· How often will the cyber range be used, and what kinds of training events will be hosted?
· Which technologies will need to be involved?
Having formulated a proper understanding of the desired outcomes, you will be better prepared to send out a structured and itemized request for proposals to potential cyber range partners. Also, answering these questions will make it relatively easy to compare different proposals when you have clearly laid out what your requirements are.
Why Does a Request for Proposal (RFP) Matter?
A Request for Proposal (RFP) is a document that outlines the requirements for a project or product and is used to solicit proposals from vendors. The purpose of an RFP is to provide a clear and comprehensive description of the project requirements, so that vendors can provide accurate proposals and organizations can make informed decisions.
In the case of a cyber range, the RFP should outline the organization’s goals, objectives, and requirements for the cyber range. It should also include a description of the desired features, capabilities, and services that the cyber range should provide.
Taking the time to map out your organization’s needs and priorities helps with optimizing both the quality and cost of the eventual cyber range solution.
Step 2. Balance Features and Capacity Against Realistic Usage
Don’t shoot a fly with a cannon. It is not necessary to waste your entire investment on technical infrastructure when, in reality, all you might need is training content and helping hands to instruct your team.
The following questions make it easier to understand what cyber range features and capacity-related factors to take into consideration:
· Are you building a national cyber range capability or an affordable training environment for your internal workforce?
· What use cases are you planning to have? Is it individual or team-based events, instructor-led training or self-learning? Live fire and/or capture the flag exercises? Testing and experimenting?
· Will you need the ability to operate the cyber range independently from the cyber range partner and to create your own content?
· How technically advanced and complex are your content and related scenarios in the context of the technical limitations set by the cyber range?
· Will you need support for special systems, such as physical and virtual systems of the likes of OT or SCADA, military equipment, and IT or telecommunications?
· Will you need integration with other external systems, including other cyber ranges (also known as ‘federation’)?
· Does cyber range need to be air-gapped from the internet and other networks?
· Will you need the cyber range to support AI assurance and testing, including the evaluation of AI-enabled systems, models, or agents? This is particularly relevant where AI supports or makes security decisions, since the exercise may need to evaluate both the technology itself and how people work with it.
Content Before Technology
It is important to consider the number of included scenarios and pre-configured exercises that will come with the cyber range solution. This is one of the most important components of successfully conducting a cyber range exercise.
A customizable target library matters as much as the number of scenarios in the package.
This makes it easier to create custom scenarios, which can be modified to fit the organization’s specific needs. The tools that are integrated into a cyber range should allow the implementation of customizable virtual machines, the creation of new projects, and editing and cloning of existing projects.
A cyber range should always come with training sessions on its usage and content creation. This enables an organization, particularly the instructors, to create and modify content that fits your organization’s needs. The training session should cover both the technical and platform operations.
Ideally, cyber range technology should not limit your organization in the number of users, scenario configurations, and iterations when planning and executing different cyber exercises for your team members.
Step 3. Choose the Delivery, Hosting, and Licensing Model That Fits Your Needs
Once you have defined your business requirements and know all about the features and capacity you will need from your cyber range, the next big question to address is about the actual delivery.
Essentially, the question stands. Are you seeking ownership of a physical cyber range, a service-based approach, or a hybrid solution?
Here are some of the typical aspects you should consider in this case:
· Are you looking to buy a cyber range as a service or as an in-house capability?
· Technically, should your cyber range be hosted on-premises within your own IT infrastructure, by your partner as a cloud-hosted solution, or as a hybrid solution of both of the options?
· Will you require training events as a service, or will you be hosting them yourself?
· What kind of licensing cost model will best serve your purposes: per user, per cyber range, or per event? Will the ability to monetize your cyber range for your own benefit be relevant to you?
Build, Buy, or Subscribe?
Three routes sit behind that question. You can build a range yourself on your own infrastructure, buy and license a commercial platform to run in-house, or subscribe to one a provider hosts and operates for you. Building gives you full control and no license fee, licensing a platform gives you control of content and operations without the build burden, and subscribing removes the infrastructure question at the price of depending on the provider for capacity. Which of the three is cheapest over three years is a separate question, and the next step answers it.
Step 4. Set Your Budget and Understand the Real Costs
Now it’s time to align your needs and expectations with your budget. How big of an investment are you considering to make for this project?
In this step, it is important to keep in mind that the investment you put in the cyber range not only helps to enhance your technical infrastructure but also takes care of your employee training aspects.
Typically, thinking about the following points will help you evaluate your needs:
· There is a wide range of costs associated with getting a cyber range. It is important to know how much your organization is ready to invest in this kind of technology.
· There are two types of costs when it comes to operating your cyber range, direct and indirect. Direct cost includes a person from your team that owns and runs the in-house cyber range. Indirect costs involve data center fees and hardware maintenance.
· Think about the type of solution you are looking to use, free and open-source software or a commercial one? It is important to acknowledge that free software usually comes with lots of hidden costs.
How Much Does It Cost?
Ask three vendors what a cyber range costs and you will get three answers that barely compare. One quotes a per-user training subscription, the next a per-event fee, the third an annual platform license with professional services stacked on top. None is being evasive: cyber range pricing really does vary by deployment model, scale, content depth, and how much of the operation you intend to run yourself.
And the headline license fee is rarely the real cost. The total is set by everything around it: the infrastructure it runs on, the people who operate it, the content that keeps it current, the customization that makes it fit your environment. A platform that looks cheap at signing can be the dearer choice within two years, once all of that is counted.
Pricing Models: How Vendors Actually Charge
Most cyber range pricing falls into one of a few models, and a single quote often blends several. Knowing which you are being offered is the first step to comparing like with like.
· Per-user or per-seat subscriptions.
The entry-level model, for self-paced skills training: each learner holds a license, commonly billed annually per head. It is predictable for a small, fixed team, but the cost climbs with every person you add, which penalizes scale and quietly discourages the broad participation that makes a training program work.
· Per-event or per-exercise fees.
For organizations that run the occasional live-fire exercise rather than training continuously. You pay per exercise window, which stays cheap if you run them rarely, but the rate compounds fast for an active program, and you are often tied to the vendor to stand up and run each one. Platforms that let you operate the range and write your own scenarios remove that dependency.
· Per-range or platform licensing.
An annual or perpetual license for the platform itself, independent of headcount. This suits organizations training many people or running frequent exercises, since the cost does not climb per participant. Perpetual licenses usually come with an annual maintenance and support fee.
· Range as a Service (RaaS) and subscription.
A hosted, subscription or pay-as-you-go model where the provider runs the underlying infrastructure. RaaS turns upfront capital cost into predictable operating cost and takes provisioning off your plate, which suits organizations that want scale and remote access without a large initial outlay.
· Usage- or tier-based pricing.
A growing alternative ties cost to how much you use the range, whether capacity, exercise volume, or tier of service, rather than to headcount, with no per-seat limit on participants.
· Custom and enterprise pricing.
At the enterprise and government grade, published rates largely disappear: pricing is quote-based, shaped by scale, deployment model, content requirements, and support tier. That is normal at the top of the market, but it makes early scoping and reference-checking essential. You cannot price-compare from a website.
Deployment Model: The Single Biggest Cost Lever
How a cyber range is delivered and hosted moves its cost more than almost any other decision.
The core question is simple: do you want to own a physical range, buy it as a service, or run a hybrid of the two?
On-Premises: Capital Expenditure Plus Indirect Costs
An on-premises range is a capital purchase. You buy and own the servers, networking, and any specialized hardware, and host it on your own infrastructure. For defense and government bodies handling classified or air-gapped data, that is often non-negotiable. But the license and hardware are only part of the figure. Running a range carries both direct costs, a dedicated person to own and operate it, and indirect ones: data-center fees, power, cooling, hardware maintenance.
A skilled operator who can design and run exercises is a senior hire, and that salary is usually the largest part of the direct cost. Automation narrows the burden, since tooling that stands up large environments in a few clicks cuts the operator time driving it. Even so, over several years the running costs can outstrip the software itself.
One question worth asking early, because it is easy to discover too late, is where do the range’s AI functions run. Scenario generation, automated scoring, and adaptive adversary emulation may depend on a hosted model that the platform calls externally. In an air-gapped or classified deployment, that dependency can conflict with security requirements or leave those functions unavailable. Ask whether the AI components can run locally on your own infrastructure, what external services they depend on, and what the range can still do when those services are unavailable.
Cloud and Range as a Service: Operating Expenditure and Elasticity
Cloud and RaaS turn that capital outlay into a recurring fee and remove the hardware-management burden, which lowers both the entry cost and, for many organizations, the multi-year total, largely because the personnel and facilities overhead of self-hosting is so easy to underestimate. None of which is a verdict against on-premises: where data sovereignty, classification, or air-gapping apply, owning the range is the right call, and its cost is justified by a requirement cloud cannot meet.
Hybrid: Matching Cost to Requirement
A hybrid model keeps the most sensitive or high-fidelity elements on-premises and leans on cloud for scale and reach. Where only part of the requirement is genuinely sensitive, this is often the most cost-efficient structure: you avoid paying for on-premises capacity you rarely use while still meeting security constraints where they genuinely apply. Worth knowing too is one-off deployment, a fully operational range stood up for a single exercise or evaluation, with no long-term infrastructure commitment when the need is occasional.
What It Costs: From SME to Enterprise
The right model, and the realistic budget, depends heavily on the size and maturity of the buyer.
Small and Mid-Sized Organizations
For an SME, the job is usually upskilling a small team without standing up infrastructure. Cyber-range-as-a-service or per-user access fits best, which can keep the annual commitment in the tens of thousands and avoids capital cost entirely. The trap at this scale is paying per seat for people who do not all train at once, or buying content depth a small team will never use.
Large Enterprises
Enterprises need broader coverage, with multiple teams, realistic SOC tooling, and cloud and OT scenarios, and they train enough people that per-seat pricing becomes the wrong structure. Usage-, capacity-, or range-based models pay off once participation is wide. Annual spend at this scale commonly reaches six figures once content, integration, and the staff time to run exercises are counted.
Broad out-of-the-box integrations and customer-authored content keep those surrounding costs down. Look for native connections to the cloud, hypervisor and SIEM tooling you already run, and the ability to build your own scenarios rather than commissioning each one.
Government and Defense
Government and defense buyers carry the most demanding requirements: on-premises or air-gapped deployment, OT and SCADA fidelity, large-scale multi-team exercises, and compliance evidence. These drive the highest budgets, and pricing is normally bespoke. CybExer, which operates in over 60 countries and has supported national-scale exercises with organizations including NATO and the British Army, sits at this tier, where tested capacity and references matter more than any headline rate.
The Costs Buyers Most Often Underestimate
The line items below rarely feature prominently in a quote, yet they are where cyber range budgets most often overrun.
· Operating staff: On-premises or hosted, someone has to design exercises, run them, and interpret the results, a substantial and recurring direct cost that is easy to leave out of the business case. AI can reduce that burden where it is built into the workflow. For example, AI-assisted scenario authoring and after-action reporting can take work off instructors. The saving, however, depends on how heavily the range is used. A team running a handful of exercises a year will see less benefit than one operating the range continuously, so model the time saved against your own training program rather than assuming a fixed reduction in staffing.
· Content updates: A scenario library is not a one-off purchase. Keeping it current against new threats is a recurring cost, and AI-assisted authoring can change that figure by reducing the effort required to create and adapt content. Check whether updates are bundled into the base fee or sold separately, whether your team can author scenarios in-house or has to commission the vendor for each one, and whether AI-assisted authoring is included or priced as an add-on. The more dependent you are on the vendor for new scenarios, the more expensive it becomes to keep the range current.
· Customization and professional services: Tailoring scenarios to your environment, building digital twins, or wiring the range into your SIEM and identity tooling often sits outside the base price as chargeable work.
· Special systems: Support for OT, SCADA, military equipment, or telecoms systems, physical or virtual, adds cost, and is worth scoping explicitly.
· Federation and integration: Connecting to external systems, to other cyber ranges (federation), and into your existing security and learning infrastructure all carry configuration cost, lower on platforms with broad native integrations.
· The hidden cost of ‘free’: Capable open-source and self-built ranges exist, and they carry no license fee, but the cost simply moves: cloud compute (entry-level instances are outgrown quickly), Windows and product license keys, and, above all, the engineering time to build, secure, and keep the content current yourself.
Total Cost of Ownership: Thinking Beyond Year One
A cyber range is a multi-year investment, and its real cost only comes into focus over that horizon. Perpetual licenses with annual maintenance, subscriptions, and RaaS each carry a different financial risk profile across three to five years. Cheapest in year one is not cheapest by year three, once maintenance, content updates, scaling, and staff time are in the picture.
The reliable way to compare is to model the full operating cost, covering license, infrastructure, staffing, content, and services, across the deployment life you expect, for each shortlisted vendor. The cheapest cyber range is rarely the most economical, and the most expensive is not automatically the most capable. The organizations that get the most from the investment scope the requirement honestly, pick a deployment model that fits their operational and security constraints, and budget for the full cost of ownership rather than the license alone.
Step 5. Select a Cyber Range Partner That Is Best for You
The final step is to choose the cyber range partner that will assist you meet your needs – there is a variety of vendors and services in the marketplace to choose from. As a buyer, it is crucial that you educate yourself about the topic to make informed decisions.
The best practices while purchasing a cyber range include:
- Before making a final decision, make sure you familiarize yourself with the technology and different offers and vendors are giving.
- It is a good idea to study the cyber range provider’s references in terms of projects, events, and support procedures. Have they successfully delivered projects or events similar to yours?
- Do your homework on the vendor companies too – what kind of organizations are they working with, and what are their backgrounds, capabilities, and experience?
- Arrange pre-procurement meetings to share information both ways and even map out details in the proposal about the subsequent delivery processes.
Common Cyber Range Buying and Training Mistakes
Most of these are decisions made at purchase that only show up later, once people are supposed to be training on the thing.
· Over-weighting the hardware.
The most common mistake that organizations tend to make when purchasing cyber ranges is that they over-emphasize the role of the physical hardware and computing power, leaving too few resources for cyber range software and for leveraging the infrastructure for the best outcomes, which includes the human training and learning aspect.
· Buying depth nobody uses.
At smaller scale the trap is paying per seat for people who do not all train at once, or buying content depth a small team will never use.
· Not asking for a demonstration.
There are many cyber range solutions on the market that simply don’t deliver what they promise before purchasing their solution, which is why a live demonstration of how it works in practice is worth requesting.
CybExer Technologies – Leading the Way to Cyber Preparedness
While considering purchasing the cyber range technology to enhance the cyber resilience of your team, remember that it is always a good idea to consult a cyber range expert before submitting a request for a proposal to potential vendors.
This way, you will receive valuable insights, validate your requirements, and optimize your resources for the best possible outcome.
CybExer has delivered cyber range capability to defense, government, and enterprise customers across more than 60 countries, supporting cyber-range-as-a-service, bespoke on-premises, and one-off deployments. Its pricing is tier-based on usage rather than per user, so cost scales with how much you train, not how many people you train, with no per-seat limit.
If you’d like to learn more about our offerings, feel free to schedule a call with our cyber range experts to discuss your organization’s needs.
