You are a contracting officer’s technical representative, a security system engineer, at a military hospital. Your department’s leaders are adopting a new medical health care database management system. And they’ve tasked you to create a request for proposal for which different vendors will compete to build and provide to the hospital.

A request for proposal, or RFP, is when an organization sends out a request for estimates on performing a function, delivering a technology, or providing a service or augmenting staff. RFPs are tailored to each endeavor but have common components and are important in the world of IT contracting and for procurement and acquisitions.

To complete the RFP, you must determine the technical and security specifications for the system. You’ll write the requirements for the overall system and provide evaluation standards that will be used in rating the vendor’s performance. Your learning will help you determine your system’s requirements.

As you discover methods of attack, you’ll write prevention and remediation requirements for the vendor to perform. You must identify the different vulnerabilities the database should be hardened against.