News Brief: New Public Procurement Draft 2026 — What Incident Response Buyers Need to Know

Hook: Procurement language shapes how incident response teams are bought — and funded

The 2026 public procurement draft introduces clauses that affect supplier accessibility, sustainability criteria, and incident response procurement. Buyers need to act now to align RFPs and procurement timelines with these changes.

What changed — quick summary

The draft emphasizes accessibility, sustainability, and incident readiness. It introduces new evaluation criteria for security services, including documented incident response plans and post-incident learning commitments. For practitioners, see the draft overview at Public Procurement Draft 2026.

Why incident response buyers should care

New procurement language can alter scoring in RFPs and lead to longer procurement cycles. Buyers should update templates to include clear metrics for response SLAs, logging retention, and sandbox testing of playbooks.

Practical changes to RFP templates

1. Require demonstrable tabletop exercise reports and postmortem summaries.
2. Define SLAs with clear measurement windows and penalties.
3. Ask for environmental and sustainability commitments where relevant.
4. Include migration and data sanitization clauses mirroring cloud and edge backup expectations discussed in edge backup reviews.

Operational recommendations

Buyers should pilot procurement with two suppliers to reduce selection risk and ensure operational fit. Use incident response hardening playbooks for evaluation criteria (authorize.live).

"Procurement rules will push vendors to document learning — buyers should require evidence, not just assertions."

Policy and legal considerations

Legal teams should weigh new privacy and data-handling clauses. Where onboarding is remote-first, immigration and onboarding support guidance may intersect, especially for cross-border contractors (see remote-first onboarding changes at deport.top).

Next steps for buyers

• Update procurement language to include evidence-based scoring.
• Run tabletop exercises and include results in RFPs.
• Coordinate with legal on data retention and sanitization clauses.

For a practitioner's take on the draft and accessibility provisions, see the review at legislation.live. To align incident response requirements with operational practices, consult the incident response hardening playbook (authorize.live).