What is a lab environment?
A lab environment is a place that has computers or servers used for testing different use cases or projects in development, test and production type scenarios.  Lab environment may more relaxed security rules too if new technology is being tested for production use in a company to get a go / no-go answer faster.  Lab environments save money because solutions and proof of concepts can usually be built out a lot of faster reducing the time to value to a technology or project decision.