Five vendor POCs, five containers, one survives

The RFP shortlist is five vendors. Each wants a proof-of-concept environment with your sample data, and each POC used to mean a VM request, a firewall ticket, and a budget line that outlived the evaluation.

Now it's an "evaluations" project with five containers, each cloned from the same seeded snapshot. Each vendor gets a token scoped to its container and nothing else; they install their product, wire it to the data, run their demo. The five run side by side on one server, isolated at the OS level. The two that stall in week one just sit there: idle containers cost nothing, so nobody decides mid-evaluation whether to tear them down.

Decision day: the winner's container is copied into the production project and becomes the starting point for rollout. The other four are deleted, or kept as the record of what was evaluated.

The POC environment is disposable, so the evaluation can afford to be thorough.