Air-Gapped Deployment RFP Annexure Template

Technical committees are not cruel when they mark every air-gap row as met. They are under-specified. A bidder who has a slide titled Air Gap and a bidder who has an offline licence, an internal registry and a 90-day isolation drill look the same if the annexure is a single yes/no. The cheaper slide wins. Six months later the isolation drill is sold as a change request.

This template is a set of rows you can paste into an RFP annexure, a GeM custom-bid ATC, or a department scope of work. It is not a complete tender. It does not replace GFR, your manual, legal vetting, or the live GeM terms. It is the air-gap slice. Combine it with commercial, staffing and DPDP rows you already use.

Language is deliberately boring. Evaluators should be able to ask for an artefact and tick a box. Where a row says attach, a paragraph in the technical bid is not an attachment.

How to use these rows without creating a single-source spec

Mark each row as mandatory or scored. Mandatory rows should be rare and binary: isolation drill, empty-or-named egress schedule, offline licence. Scored rows can allow approaches (diode versus courier, CPU versus GPU) so you do not write a brand into the law of the tender. Do not name a vendor product as the only way to satisfy a row. Describe the artefact.

If you are buying on GeM, confirm whether these rows belong in the catalogue specification, in an ATC / additional terms, or in a custom bid. Category templates change. Read the live bid form on gem.gov.in. This article will not invent a category id.

Ten rows that can be marked. Add site-specific power, language and language-eval rows as needed.

Row (paste-ready)	Artefact to attach	Fail if
Runtime operates with no outbound network except destinations listed in Schedule A	Schedule A (may be empty) + staging pcap	Schedule says as required or is missing
Licence / entitlement works for 90 days with WAN unreachable	Offline activation note + 90-day statement	Licence needs a vendor host on a timer
Images and weights install from hashed media we define	Manifest template + hash algorithm	Install requires a pull from a public registry
Time and DNS use sources we name on our network	Architecture note naming NTP/DNS	Public pool or public resolver required
No telemetry, crash or usage endpoint outside our SIEM	Build flag / config dump + pcap	Hidden SaaS destination in pcap
Support access is off by default, dual-controlled, recorded	SOP + sample recording retention	Standing vendor tunnel required to operate
Bidder will run a 14-day isolation on our staging VLAN before go-live	Willingness letter + previous drill report if any	Refusal, or drill only on their laptop
Logs retained 180 days under our control in Indian jurisdiction	Log-flow diagram	Logs only in vendor cloud or on engineer laptops
Customer content not used to train models other customers can reach	Contract clause + technical isolation note	Improvement / safety clause without a hop list
Exit: return, verify, delete, certificate, clock	Draft certificate + clock in days	Delete on request with no clock or verify

Schedule A and the isolation drill — write them in full

Schedule A is a table: destination, port, protocol, purpose, data classes, owner, review date. Instruct bidders to fill it. An empty table is a valid and often excellent answer. A table that lists a licence host in another country is also valid if you are willing to accept that hop — but then you must not title the deployment air-gapped. You must title it on-prem with named egress. The annexure should force that honesty.

The isolation drill is not a demo. Specify: our VLAN, our deny rule, media we approve, fourteen days or another clock you can staff, a restart test, a licence-interval test, and a packet capture filed with the acceptance note. If the bidder wants to run it in their lab, that is a pre-bid confidence test, not acceptance. Include a language row if officers work in Hindi or a state language.

Commercial hooks so the rows survive award

Tie a portion of acceptance and payment to the isolation drill and to the empty-or-named Schedule A as tested, not as promised. Otherwise the annexure is literature. Forbid will comply after award on mandatory air-gap rows. That phrase is how the slide wins. Require the same rows to bind subcontractors and any remote support partner. Air gaps die in the SI's toolkit as often as in the ISV's runtime.

1. Paste the ten rows. Add site rows. Mark mandatory versus scored.
2. Define Schedule A and the isolation drill in definitions.
3. Bind payment / acceptance to the drill.
4. Vet language with legal so you do not create an unintended brand lock.
5. If using GeM, place rows where the live bid form actually evaluates them.
6. File the marked annexure behind the award note.

Objections you will hear — and what to do with them

These are the lines that stall the file. Answer them in the room, then put the answer in the note. A spoken answer without paper will be forgotten by the next officer.

This will reduce competition.

It will reduce fiction. If the market cannot isolate, you should know before award. A large field of yes-ticks is not competition. It is a chorus.

Our legal cell does not understand pcaps.

Then define the artefact as packet capture or firewall log showing no successful connection outside Schedule A during the drill, signed by the SDC. Legal can understand a signed log. They should not be asked to interpret TCP flags.

We will put this in an SLA instead of the annexure.

An SLA after award is late. Put the drill in acceptance. Use the SLA for staying isolated, not for becoming isolated.

A one-week annexure sprint

1. Day 1: CISO and SDC mark which of the ten rows are mandatory on this site.
2. Day 2: procurement pastes rows into the live GeM or RFP form and checks they are evaluable.
3. Day 3: legal removes brand locks and adds the payment hook.
4. Day 4: a friendly vendor red-teams the language for accidental single-source.
5. Day 5: file the annexure with Schedule A blank as the expected happy path.

How this shows up in the file

Keep the marked annexure, the definition of the drill, and the payment clause together. When a bidder writes deviations — nil, you should still know which artefact they owe in week two. This template is not legal advice. Your counsel owns the final words.

Definitions to paste so rows mean the same thing

Define air-gapped in the tender as: no routed connectivity from the processing environment to networks outside the purchaser's control except destinations listed in Schedule A. Define isolation drill as: operation for the stated clock on the purchaser's VLAN under the purchaser's deny rule, installed from purchaser-approved media, with a filed packet capture or firewall log. Define customer content as: prompts, retrieval chunks, traces, eval items and any derivative store. Without definitions, bidders will comply with their own brochure.

Scoring versus mandatory — a worked split

Mandatory: Schedule A exists and is empty or named; 14-day drill accepted; offline licence for 90 days; no training of shared models on customer content; logs under purchaser control for 180 days in Indian jurisdiction. Scored: quality of media SOP, language eval, time-to-restore from gold image, quality of jump-host SOP. This split keeps the market open while still failing a phone-home runtime.

What legal will argue — and how to help them

Legal will fear brand lock and unenforceable technical poetry. Give them artefact nouns and a payment hook. They can defend no acceptance until the drill log is signed more easily than vendor shall be truly air-gapped. Offer a deviation table so honest bidders can propose an equivalent diode instead of a courier without being non-responsive. Keep CERT-In and DPDP sentences in their own annexure. The air-gap annexure should not pretend to be the Act.

This article is informational field guidance, not legal or procurement advice. Confirm against the current Gazette, GFR, GeM portal terms and your counsel before you file it.

How to prove this on a rack, not on a slide

“Air-Gapped Deployment RFP Annexure Template” only matters if a CISO can fail it. A P2 Procurement should be able to point at a cable, a registry, a licence file, a PDU reading or a SIEM index and say: this is the control. If the only evidence is a brochure that mentions “air gap RFP annexure”, you do not have the control.

If the annexure is one line — must support air-gap — every bidder will comply. These rows turn the claim into something an evaluator can fail. Air-gap and on-prem programmes die in the second month, when the first update, the first crash, or the first GPU lead-time slip arrives. Budget the boring path — media, offline licence, local registry, local traces — in the same note as the model name.

On-prem is not air-gapped. An India region is not either. Write the forbidden path (outbound HTTPS, licence phone-home, crash reporter, hidden model API) as a numbered list and test it with the internet off. Whatever still dies was a dependency you did not draw.

1. Draw the data path for one user-visible answer under “air gap RFP annexure”.
2. Disable outbound internet on staging and run the demo script.
3. List every remaining hop: update, licence, registry, NTP, DNS, SIEM.
4. Give each hop an owner inside the department, not only the SI.
5. Minute the restore or the media-transfer once before go-live.

Close this loop before the next CAB

Put “Air-Gapped Deployment RFP Annexure Template” on the next change-advisory or bid-opening agenda as a single line item with an owner. If it cannot earn a line item, it will not earn a control. The owner should be a P2 Procurement, not “the vendor.”

Revisit the item when the model, the GeM term, the region, or the SI changes. “air gap RFP annexure” is not a one-time workshop. It is a watch item. Date the last check. Unsigned watch items are souvenirs.