This checklist is for teams evaluating a vendor in the AI security space, whether that vendor sells a gateway, a guardrail library, a monitoring product, or a governance platform. The category is new enough that marketing language varies widely between vendors selling genuinely different things, so the questions below are written to get past that and into concrete, checkable answers. Work through it during a proof of concept, not only from a sales deck, and insist on answers you can verify rather than ones you have to take on trust. None of these questions assumes a particular deployment model is correct; the point is to find out clearly what you're actually buying before you commit budget and integration work to it.
Deployment model
Confirm exactly how the vendor's product integrates: as an inline gateway sitting in the request path, as an SDK embedded in your own code, or as an out-of-band system that observes traffic after the fact rather than controlling it. Confirm what each of those models actually means for your ability to block a bad action versus only detect it afterward, since that distinction matters more than which deployment label sounds more modern. Confirm latency impact has been measured under conditions similar to your own traffic, not estimated or asserted, and ask to see the measurement methodology directly. Confirm what happens architecturally when the product needs to make a decision that depends on calling out to another service itself, since a policy check that introduces its own network hop adds a failure mode worth understanding before it's in your production path.
Policy flexibility
Confirm policy can be defined and changed by your own team without opening a support ticket or waiting on the vendor's engineering time, since a security control you can't adjust quickly during an incident is of limited use during that incident. Confirm the product actually supports the specific model providers and tools your organization uses today, not a generic claim of broad compatibility, and ask for the exact list. Confirm how policy changes are tested and rolled out, whether there's a staging or dry-run mode before a policy change takes effect in production.
Data handling
Confirm precisely what the vendor's system sees: full prompts and responses, metadata only, or something in between, since that answer determines how much of your own sensitive data now has a second home. Confirm where prompts, responses, and logs are stored, in what jurisdiction, and for how long, and get this in writing rather than as a verbal assurance. Confirm access controls on the vendor's side restrict who at the vendor can see your data, and ask what happens to that data if you terminate the contract. Confirm whether the vendor uses customer data, in any form, to train or improve its own models, and get an explicit answer rather than a general privacy policy reference.
Evidence and audit quality
Confirm audit records produced by the product are exportable in a format your own team can actually use, not locked into a proprietary viewer with no export path. Confirm those records are tamper-evident, so they hold up as evidence during an investigation rather than as a log an attacker or a careless internal process could quietly alter. Confirm the product integrates with your existing SIEM or logging pipeline rather than requiring your team to monitor yet another isolated dashboard.
Operational fit
Confirm what happens to your application if the vendor's service degrades or becomes unreachable: does traffic fail closed, fail open, or does the vendor's product sit entirely out of the request path where this question doesn't apply. Confirm what support the vendor actually provides during an active incident, response time commitments and a real point of contact, not only a general service level agreement. Confirm the pricing model scales with your actual usage, request volume or policy evaluations, rather than being structured primarily around seat counts that have little relationship to how much protection you're actually getting.
Where TELEON fits
The questions in this checklist apply to any vendor in this space, including TELEON, and are worth asking regardless of who you're evaluating. TELEON's own answers follow directly from its architecture: it deploys as a gateway between agents and the model providers or tools they call, enforces policy at the tool-call boundary, produces a tamper-evident audit trail of that activity, and applies privacy vault tokenization to sensitive values before they reach the model or a log. Asking the same questions of every vendor you evaluate, including TELEON, is the point of this checklist.
The checklist in short form
- Deployment model and measured, not assumed, latency impact.
- Policy defined and changed by your own team, with real provider support.
- Clear answers on what the vendor sees and where your data lives.
- Exportable, tamper-evident audit records that integrate with your SIEM.
- Documented fail-open or fail-closed behavior under vendor degradation.
- Incident support commitments and usage-based pricing.
Weight these questions differently depending on how central the vendor's product will sit in your architecture. A monitoring tool that only observes traffic after the fact deserves less scrutiny on fail-closed behavior than an inline gateway that actively blocks actions, since the consequence of that gateway's own failure is direct and immediate. Revisit this evaluation if the vendor's product, your own architecture, or your regulatory obligations change materially after you've signed.