Solution Description

The 'Solution Description' question in the HECVAT (Higher Education Community Vendor Assessment Toolkit) is asking you to provide a comprehensive overview of your product or service. This question serves as a foundation for the entire security assessment, helping the evaluators understand what your solution does, how it works, and what systems or data it might interact with. This question is being asked because security assessments need context about your solution to properly evaluate potential risks. Different types of solutions have different security considerations - a cloud-based data analytics platform has different security implications than an on-premises student information system. Without understanding what your solution does, evaluators cannot properly assess the relevance and adequacy of your other security controls. When answering this question, you should: 1. Clearly describe what your product or service does in functional terms 2. Explain the technical architecture at a high level (cloud-based, on-premises, hybrid) 3. Identify what types of data your solution processes or stores 4. Mention any significant integrations with other systems 5. Note any particularly relevant security features 6. Be comprehensive but concise - typically 1-3 paragraphs is sufficient The goal is to give evaluators enough information to understand your solution's scope and purpose, which will frame how they interpret the rest of your security responses.