Assessing Vendors by Josh More

Author:Josh More
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780124104464
Publisher: Elsevier Inc.
Published: 2013-04-10T16:00:00+00:00

Phase 5

Deep Testing

5.1 Deep Testing

5.2 Fair Versus Unfair Testing

5.3 Identifying Needs

5.3.1 Deep-Testing Availability

5.3.2 Deep-Testing Possession/Control

5.3.3 Deep-Testing Confidentiality

5.3.4 Deep-Testing Utility

5.3.5 Deep-Testing Integrity

5.3.6 Deep-Testing Authenticity

5.3.7 Cryptography Advice from Anthony J. Stieber

5.1 Deep Testing

When you get to the Deep-Testing phase, you should be down to three to six vendors. The goal here is strictly to assess how well they will meet your needs. You’ve done your research, watched videos, played with demos, and done whatever you needed to do to answer the basic filtering questions. Now it’s time for them to prove what they can do.

Once again, it is important to keep time from running away from you, but it is extremely unlikely that you will be able to do deep functional testing for a vendor in a day or even two. The length of time will depend mostly on your time and dollar budgets. Larger organizations can take months to assess a vendor, while smaller organizations sometimes skip this step completely and just go with someone they know works. Any approach along this continuum is valid. However, to keep things relatively realistic, the rest of this section will assume that you have decided that a week is sufficient time to assess each vendor and that a week is also sufficient time to set up the test itself.

These numbers were chosen because, for most technologies that aren’t horribly complex, a week is enough time to find flaws that will derail the actual use of the technology but not so long that you wind up getting lost in the details. These numbers will not be sufficient for technologies that require a long tuning period, such as Data Loss Prevention (DLP) or network white-listing technologies. However, those vendors are not likely to allow you to do free testing as the functional test itself would provide you with enough value to indicate it might make good economic sense to simply use that data to fix your issues and not purchase the product.

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