What to Keep in Mind When Creating a Request for Proposal (RFP) for Cyber Range?

Getting a cyber range to enhance your organization’s security posture is an important step for boosting your team’s overall cyber resilience. 

However, there are many cyber range providers on the market, and choosing the technology that reflects on your organization’s specific training needs can be challenging. 

This article will tell you all about the most important aspects to keep in mind when creating a Request for Proposal (RFP) document for purchasing a cyber range to make sure you take full advantage of your investment in this technology. 

What Is a Cyber Range and How Can You Purchase One?

Cyber ranges allow organizations to train their personnel and test their security systems and processes in a safe and controlled environment. 

The demand for cyber ranges has increased significantly over the past couple of years – this is mostly because of the steady growth of digitalization in today’s world and increased amounts of cyber attacks on different organizations globally. 

However, it is important to keep in mind that organizations use cyber ranges to address their specific issue. Therefore, it is important to define your exact requirements to make sure that the cyber range of your choosing reflects on your specific needs. 

That’s exactly where a Request for Proposal (RFP) is increasingly useful – this document specifies the requirements for cyber range and makes the purchasing process more efficient for vendors, as well as the cyber range providers. 

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. 

Follow along as we discuss some of the best practices that our team at CybExer has discovered over the years for crafting Request for Proposal documents that help the purchasing organization get the best value out of their investment into the cyber range. 

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. 

What to Keep in Mind When Crafting a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a Cyber Range Provider?

When creating an RFP Document, it is important to keep many different factors in mind to ensure that the cyber range solution meets your expectations and reflects on your organization’s specific needs. 

Let’s divide these factors into two main categories – the one that takes care of the content aspect of your cyber training and the other one that ensures the technical effectiveness of a cyber range solution.

Best Practices for Your Content Requirements in Cyber Range

Training sessions and exercises should be able to support the engagement of different stakeholders, ranging from technical IT security and cyber defense staff to reporting and analysis specialists and team management employees. 

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. There should also be a maintenance aspect of the cyber range so that the team can maintain and operate it independently. 

It is important to make sure that your organization has the ability to develop its cyber capability at an ambitious level. 

This means that the cyber range you are purchasing should include highly complex and large-scale exercises that are able to accommodate thousands of participants covering the most advanced technical solutions. 

The cyber range of your choosing should contain hands-on classroom training sessions combined with theoretical lectures and real-life technical laboratories, as well as Capture-the-Flag type of training sessions and competitions. 

These sessions must be task-driven exercises with a focus on improving the participants’ skills in coming up with prompt responses and investigating causes and effects. 

It is important that all of your employees with different levels of skills and expertise take advantage of the training that Cyber Range offers. A hand-on, practical approach helps participants understand the actual nature of cyber attacks. 

The cyber range training must enable participants to practice for realistic scenarios and improve their cyber preparedness with relevant tasks, objectives, automatic scoring, and results provided within the cyber exercises. 

You should always pay attention to 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. 

Best Practices From the Technological Point of View 

The hardware requirements for a cyber range depend entirely on the specific needs of your organization. 

In order to match the hardware requirements with the actual needs, it is highly recommended that you thoroughly sort out exactly which exercises and events you would like to host and run on the cyber range. 

Another important point to consider is the future use cases of your cyber range technology. If your organization plans to regularly host exercises, then the underlying infrastructure should be scalable for the upcoming activities. 

For that, you must ensure that the cyber range of your choosing has the ability to easily integrate with third-party systems as well. 

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. 

Pay attention to potential artificial limitations of the technical cyber range platform. The organization that purchases the cyber range should have full administrative access to the entire solution and its content library. 

It is highly recommended to ask for a live demonstration of how a specific cyber range solution works in practice. 

There are many cyber range solutions on the market that simply don’t deliver what they promise before purchasing their solution. There are also “Gamenet scanner” methods that cannot perform the tasks that cyber ranges can. 

Tools may be integrated with cyber ranges that enable an overview of the performance of users in a variety of visual representations. 

These tools may be license-based, which means that you should also pay attention to the validity time frame and expiration date on any potential scoring and visualization licenses. 

Cyber ranges run on an underlying technical infrastructure – there are different levels of computing power available. 

It is important to understand what cyber range solutions can run on your existing infrastructure in terms of its computing power. Also, if additional computing power will be needed, how will it be arranged, and at what cost?  

To conduct successful cyber training, you must ensure that the tools integrated into a cyber range enable the deployment and management of game scenarios and can be used to prepare and create new targets for specific gamenets. 

Pay attention to the option for cyber range trainees to directly administer workstations and IT systems during exercises. Make sure that the cyber range of your choosing has the basic virtual machine management functionalities and remote console access. 

CybExer Technologies – Leading the Way to Cyber Preparedness 

When it comes to improving your organization’s security posture, companies and organizations worldwide must embrace innovative training solutions like Cyber Range technology to educate their teams and boost their cyber preparedness. 

CybExer Technologies has been a driving force in the cybersecurity landscape since 2016. Our advanced cyber range platform assists enterprises with comprehensive cybersecurity training modules designed to enhance their cyber resilience to face potential threats and attacks. If you’d like to learn more about our offering, feel free to schedule a call with our cyber range experts to discuss your organization’s needs.