Take the time to define your requirements, narrow down your choices and put candidates to the test.

. These products generally support all the major firewall vendors and some others, as well as major network devices, so you should be covered. Take both present and future needs into account. For example, you may run a single platform across the organization now, but future acquisitions may run on other vendors' infrastructures. These tools should be able to help whether you plan to migrate onto a single platform or continue to manage several while still realizing the efficiencies they promise. See if the vendor has a software development kit that can allow it to integrate with unsupported platforms.

Check that coverage for network devices is included. There are a couple of considerations here. First, it may be important to you to clean up and optimize access control lists on your routers, and second, routers are increasingly featuring more built-in security capabilities.

. Those vendors that focus largely on enterprise deployments claim they can scale up to thousands of devices. Determine what that actually means in terms of management and the ability to perform under stress.