Participating vendors and service providers include Cato, Aryaka, BT Business, Peplink, Meraki, Versa, Palo Alto and VMware.
In UK procurement an RFI is often called a PIN or early market engagement, and the RFP that follows an ITT or a tender. The process here applies to both, for UK and North American businesses with national or global requirements.
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Netify SASE RFI: What to Ask Vendors Before the RFP (2026.1)
A SASE RFI gathers capability-level information from vendors before you run a formal RFP, covering platform scope, PoP coverage, operating model, indicative commercials and reference evidence. Netify's SASE RFI question set covers the five areas below, and feeds directly into the SASE RFP Builder once you're actually ready to go to market.
Platform scope - whether the SSE stack, FWaaS, CASB, SWG, ZTNA, is genuinely built into the platform or licensed in from elsewhere is worth establishing early, and an architecture diagram usually settles it one way or the other. It's also worth asking what share of the vendor's own customer base runs the full SASE stack as opposed to SD-WAN alone, since that rough breakdown tends to tell you rather a lot about how mature the security side of the platform actually is in practice.
Coverage - how many PoPs the vendor operates, and critically how many of those actually sit within your own operating regions rather than somewhere else entirely, is worth getting a proper map for rather than just a headline count. Typical latency to major cloud providers from your nearest PoP is also worth asking for as an indicative figure, since a general claim of "low latency" doesn't tell you a great deal on its own.
Operating model - fully managed, co-managed or DIY delivery are the three options worth asking about, along with what a genuine one-page comparison of those delivery models actually looks like in practice. The typical onboarding timeline from signed order through to live service is also worth pinning down, and a reference timeline from a recent deployment tends to be worth considerably more than an estimate plucked from a sales conversation.
Commercial ranges - an indicative per-user monthly price range at roughly your scale is a reasonable thing to ask for at this stage, not a binding quote, just a ballpark that gives you something to work with. Whether any minimum user or site thresholds apply before pricing even kicks in is worth clarifying too, alongside what's typically excluded from the headline price altogether, premium tiers, implementation and support tend to be the usual culprits here, and it's genuinely worth getting that list upfront rather than discovering it further down the line.
Evidence - two reference customers of comparable size and sector, with contact details you'll actually use rather than a name on a slide, are worth asking for directly. Independent certifications relevant to your sector, ISO 27001, SOC 2, or whatever else applies, are worth seeing as current certificates rather than just logos sitting on a website. And whether there have been any material service outages or security incidents in the last 12 months is, frankly, the one question vendors most often try to deflect around, so it's worth pushing for a direct answer rather than accepting a vague one.
A healthcare RFI would typically also ask about segregating clinical, guest and IoMT traffic, which is a requirement specific to that sector rather than a general one every buyer needs to worry about.
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The Netify SD-WAN RFP Standard
An SD-WAN RFP should request a clear set of information defining your environment, specific pain points and objectives. The Netify RFP Builder enables you to define evaluation priorities (identifying which capabilities matter most, such as security stack integration or connectivity underlay) and pre-filter providers based on geographic coverage and operational model.
What’s Included in an RFP?
- 30+ Providers — access to more than 30 Providers across multiple service categories.
- Sector Libraries — sector-calibrated question libraries for rapid deployment.
- In-Platform Scoring — scoring framework built into the platform.
RFP Question Checklist
The Netify Builder includes over 115 weighted questions. Here are sample questions to consider for your RFP:
- Deployment: Detail your zero-touch provisioning workflow and timeline from hardware delivery to operational status.
- Resilience: Evidence resilient connectivity options appropriate to each site category, including documented failover thresholds.
- Performance: Explain your path selection algorithms and latency management techniques for time-sensitive traffic.
- Security: Detail your approach to segregating clinical, guest and IoMT traffic streams with auditable change tracking.
- Operations: Describe your diagnostic workflow for distinguishing connectivity issues from equipment or application problems.
How to Compare Pricing in an SD-WAN RFI
Ask for like-for-like unit pricing rather than a headline monthly cost, per site or per Mbps, whichever unit actually reflects how you'll scale, so that you're comparing pricing structures against each other rather than just the number sitting on the front page. It's also worth getting the contract term and any renewal uplift mechanism written down upfront, because a cheaper year-one quote can still end up costing more over a 3 or 5-year term once those uplifts start being applied. And it's worth asking specifically about mid-term change rights, what it actually costs to add a site, change bandwidth, or otherwise adjust the contract before the term ends, since that's usually where the real cost differences between vendors end up showing themselves, rather than in the headline pricing everyone focuses on.
How the SD-WAN RFP Builder Works
Running an SD-WAN RFP through Netify follows five steps: question selection, requirement definition, marketplace publication, response management and scoring.
- Introduce: Input your industry, company overview and primary contact details.
- Define: Add your sites, circuits, cloud destinations, security requirements and rollout constraints.
- Receive Proposals: Vendors respond to each requirement with structured, comparable answers.
- Track Status: Track status, send clarifications and manage responses in one dashboard.
- Score & Compare: Apply scoring by category, score sections and generate a ranked shortlist with identified gaps.
How to Tailor an SD-WAN RFP to Specific Sectors
SD-WAN evaluation demands vary substantially by industry; it is vital to tailor your RFP to sector-specific constraints.
Healthcare — Clinical System Availability & Isolation
Healthcare SD-WAN evaluation must examine clinical system availability, traffic isolation for patient care versus guest networks, and clinician remote access patterns.
- Can the provider enforce segmented traffic policies with auditable tracking?
- Does the proposal incorporate resilient access options for each site type?
- Detail your approach to segregating clinical and guest traffic streams.
FAQ
What should an SD-WAN RFP include to compare providers fairly?
An SD-WAN RFP should request detailed information defining your environment, technical requirements, and objectives, followed by standardised questions structured to gather directly comparable evidence.
How do I evaluate SD-WAN & SASE capabilities in an RFP?
By including specific security requirement modules, you can force vendors to provide technical evidence of their combined networking and security capabilities within a single framework.