Security is an essential part of building trust with business prospects. As cybersecurity threats keep evolving, you need to assure your stakeholders, especially clients, that your organization holds a solid security posture and is capable of mitigating internal and external risks.
Security questionnaires are a widely adopted method of exchanging security information with prospects and other key stakeholders. They help you demonstrate your security controls confidently and steer business negotiations in the right direction.
In this guide, we’ll share everything you should know about security questionnaires, including the following key areas:
- The key purpose of a security questionnaire
- Security questionnaire use cases
- Popular security questionnaire formats
- Tips to respond to questionnaires efficiently
What is a security questionnaire?
A security questionnaire is a comprehensive set of questions designed to assess an organization’s security posture on a granular level. Questionnaires are an integral part of vendor and third-party assessments because they communicate an organization’s ability and willingness to implement and follow industry-standard security controls.
A security questionnaire can serve two main purposes depending on which side of the due diligence process you sit on:
- If you’re considering a business relationship with a new vendor, partner, or service provider, you want to learn about the organization’s security practices before kicking off an official partnership and onboarding.
- On the other hand, if you’re the vendor, partner, or service provider, you need to answer security questionnaires cohesively and effectively to ensure prospects that it's safe to do business with your company—and ultimately win more deals.
How to create a security questionnaire: Key contents
If you’re evaluating vendors before a new business relationship, it’s essential to first create a security questionnaire to cover all areas your security team deems important.
Ideally, a security questionnaire should have all the data your organization needs to get insight into a prospective vendor’s security policies and procedures. It should cover topics related to their organization’s compliance with legal and industry-specific regulations such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, or NIST CSF. Most questionnaires collect information about operational continuity and incident response plans as well, as they are strong indicators of security resilience.
Some of the key security aspects addressed by a typical questionnaire include the following:
- Data security
- Access controls
- Application security
- Disaster recovery
- Physical security
- Internal risk management
- Third-party risk management
- Compliance, accreditations, and certifications
{{cta_withimage10="/cta-modules"}} | Shift Left: How to Turn Security into Revenue
What are security questionnaires used for?
A security questionnaire is a useful tool during any procurement or similar process that requires comprehensive due diligence. Besides sending out questionnaires to partners and other third parties as you scale, you’ll also receive security questionnaires from prospects—let’s explore the individual use cases below.
Sending out security questionnaires: Use cases
The following table outlines the three key use cases of sending security questionnaires to vendors:
Receiving security questionnaires: Use cases
For organizations that receive security questionnaires from their prospects, these tools have the following use cases:
4 popular industry-standard security questionnaires
Various authoritative bodies have developed industry-standard questionnaires that organizations implement in internal or external due diligence processes. The four most popular options are:
- CAIQ
- VSAQ
- SIG
- CIS Critical Security Controls
1. CAIQ
The Consensus Assessment Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) is a comprehensive questionnaire that accompanies the Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Control Matrix (CCM), a security framework for cloud computing. It’s mainly used by SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS organizations that wish to assess and document existing security controls.
The latest version of the CAIQ is v4. It includes 261 questions spread across the following 17 control families:
- A&A: Audit & Assurance
- AIS: Application & interface security
- BCR: Business continuity management and operational resilience
- CCC: Change control and configuration management
- CEK: Cryptography, encryption & key management
- DCS: Datacenter security
- DSP: Data security and privacy lifecycle management
- GRC: Governance, risk and compliance
- HRS: Human resources
- IAM: Identity & access management
- IPY: Interoperability & portability
- IVS: Infrastructure & virtualization security
- LOG: Logging and monitoring
- SEF: Security incident management, e-discovery, & cloud forensics
- STA: Supply chain management, transparency, and accountability
- TVM: Threat & vulnerability management
- UEM: Universal endpoint management
Besides the complete CAIQ, you can opt for the condensed version, CAIQ Lite. It contains 124 questions, making it useful for security reviews conducted in a time crunch. Both options can be downloaded from the Cloud Security Alliance website for free.
2. VSAQ
The Vendor Security Alliance (VSA) created VSAQ to help organizations standardize their vendor security processes and reviews. It encompasses various questions split into eight categories:
- Service overview
- Data protection & access controls
- Policies & standards
- Proactive security
- Reactive security
- Software supply chain
- Customer-facing application security
- Compliance
These categories fall under the VSAQ-Full questionnaire. If you want the simplified version, you can also choose the VSA-CORE questionnaire, which allows you to address queries under the following five subsets:
- Service introduction
- Data inventory
- Security CORE controls
- USA privacy
- GDPR privacy
Both versions of the VSAQ are available as downloadable Excel files, which you can access for free on the VSA website.
{{cta_webinar5="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation webinar
3. SIG
The Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire was developed by Shared Assessments and is primarily focused on vendor risk assessments (VRAs) and third-party risk management (TPRM). The questionnaire aims to collect data across 21 risk areas:
- Access control
- Application security
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Asset and information management
- Cloud hosting services
- Compliance management
- Cybersecurity incident management
- Endpoint security
- Enterprise risk management
- Environmental, social, governance (ESG)
- Human resources security
- Information assurance
- IT operations management
- Network security
- Nth party management
- Operational resilience
- Physical and environmental security
- Privacy management
- Server security
- Supply chain risk management (SCRM)
- Threat management
The questionnaire is quite thorough and can be highly useful for ensuring secure vendor relationships. You can buy the SIG questionnaire on the Shared Assessments website—the licenses start at $6,500 per year.
4. CIS Critical Security Controls
The Center for Internet Security or CIS released Critical Security Controls as a set of security best practices applicable to organizations across industries. At the time of writing, CIS Controls v8.1 is the latest version available, and it covers 18 controls:
- Inventory and control of enterprise assets
- Inventory and control of software assets
- Data protection
- Secure configuration of enterprise assets and software
- Account management
- Access control management
- Continuous vulnerability management
- Audit log management
- Email and web browser protections
- Malware defenses
- Data recovery
- Network infrastructure management
- Network monitoring and defense
- Security awareness and skills training
- Service provider management
- Application software security
- Incident response management
- Penetration testing
You can download CIS Controls v8.1 on the CIS website after providing information about your organization. If you plan on using it for internal purposes, you can also access the CIS Controls Self-Assessment Tool (CIS CSAT) as a free web application.
{{cta_withimage17="/cta-modules"}} | State of Trust Report
3 tips for responding to security questionnaires
As a vendor, answering security questionnaires can be a time- and resource-consuming process, especially if your team has to complete multiple questionnaires every month manually. If questionnaires aren’t completed in a timely manner—or with clear, succinct information—it will delay deal cycles and hinder your growth opportunities. To avoid such blocks and make your process more efficient, consider the following tips:
- Understand your security posture thoroughly
- Consider building a knowledge base
- Automate questionnaire responses as much as possible
1. Understand your security posture thoroughly
You shouldn’t wait to receive a security questionnaire to start thinking about your security posture.
Last-minute evaluations significantly impact your ability to respond to multiple questionnaires. If you get a considerable stream of leads, you may not be able to keep up with all their individual security questionnaire requirements. For instance, you may be unable to tailor your security posture for a particular prospect—as a result, deals may fall through and hurt your bottom line.
It’s also good to be proactive about assessing and improving your security posture regardless of your prospects. A complete understanding of your security infrastructure is essential for many reasons beyond closing deals, most notably:
- Threat prevention and risk mitigation
- Compliance management
- Undisrupted business continuity
Another best practice is to perform regular security reviews and monitor your controls continuously so that you’re informed and ready to complete new questionnaires on short notice.
2. Build a knowledge base
You’ll most likely complete numerous questionnaires as you pursue new deals and scale your security controls. You may find repetitive queries across different questionnaires, and having a knowledge base will serve as a common reference point for your responses.
To keep all the necessary data in one place, you can create a knowledge base containing the following items:
- Information about your IT assets
- Common responses to security questions
- Relevant compliance information and documents
- Details about your questionnaire completion workflow
You can build the knowledge base with any new useful information as you complete more questionnaires. This will lower your learning curve and make future questionnaires easier to complete.
Your knowledge base should be centralized and accessible to all relevant team members. It’s best to avoid scattered spreadsheets, documents, and email chains for information exchange because they tend to complicate your workflows with additional tasks like manual data checks and maintenance.
A much better alternative is to use a dedicated software solution that unifies all your security data and lets you pull relevant information quickly.
3. Automate questionnaire responses as much as possible
Security questionnaire completion requires extensive evidence collection, which can be time-consuming if done manually. Combined with other tasks involved in the process, it might create undue pressure on security teams—especially if filling out questionnaires can lengthen deal cycles and slow down sales efforts.
While a knowledge base can streamline questionnaire responses to an extent, you’ll want to go a step further and automate different processes. You can explore an automation solution that can draw from your documentation on policies, controls, and compliance and populate at least some parts of the questionnaire without your direct input.
The best automation solutions available use AI and integrations to automatically generate questionnaire responses. Some platforms also offer pre-filled templates that you can customize for your specific needs.
{{cta_testimonial16="/cta-modules"}} | ComplyCube customer story
Automate security questionnaires effortlessly with Vanta
Vanta is a trust management platform that can accelerate your security questionnaire workflows, freeing up time for your security team to focus on other high-value tasks.
You can use Vanta’s dedicated Questionnaire Automation product to answer questionnaires 5x faster. It can streamline your workflow through many useful features, such as:
- Centralized security knowledge base: Vanta lets you keep all security information, including already answered questionnaires and updated compliance reports, in one place so that you can access it readily.
- AI-enabled responses: When you first receive a questionnaire, Vanta will draw from the knowledge base to automatically generate responses to questions, which you can review and approve. Vanta’s AI-generated responses have a 95% acceptance rate.
- Multi-format questionnaire completion: Prospects might send questionnaires in different formats, and Vanta lets you complete them without any compatibility issues.
With Vanta, you get up to 73% coverage across security questionnaires, so answering them gets considerably easier even if their volume surges.
Request a custom demo to get a personalized overview of the product from Vanta experts.
If you’re looking to proactively build trust with prospects, you’ll also want to explore Vanta’s Trust Center. It's a unified hub for your security and compliance information that you can share to build trust with your customers and stakeholders. With Trust Center, Vanta customers have seen:
- 87 percent of security reviews deflected
- 93 percent of access approvals automated
- 86 percent of NDA collection automated
Watch this webinar to get hands-on tips on how to make the most of Vanta's Trust Center.
{{cta_simple13="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation product page
Security Questionnaires
Your ultimate guide to security questionnaires
Security Questionnaires
Security is an essential part of building trust with business prospects. As cybersecurity threats keep evolving, you need to assure your stakeholders, especially clients, that your organization holds a solid security posture and is capable of mitigating internal and external risks.
Security questionnaires are a widely adopted method of exchanging security information with prospects and other key stakeholders. They help you demonstrate your security controls confidently and steer business negotiations in the right direction.
In this guide, we’ll share everything you should know about security questionnaires, including the following key areas:
- The key purpose of a security questionnaire
- Security questionnaire use cases
- Popular security questionnaire formats
- Tips to respond to questionnaires efficiently
What is a security questionnaire?
A security questionnaire is a comprehensive set of questions designed to assess an organization’s security posture on a granular level. Questionnaires are an integral part of vendor and third-party assessments because they communicate an organization’s ability and willingness to implement and follow industry-standard security controls.
A security questionnaire can serve two main purposes depending on which side of the due diligence process you sit on:
- If you’re considering a business relationship with a new vendor, partner, or service provider, you want to learn about the organization’s security practices before kicking off an official partnership and onboarding.
- On the other hand, if you’re the vendor, partner, or service provider, you need to answer security questionnaires cohesively and effectively to ensure prospects that it's safe to do business with your company—and ultimately win more deals.
How to create a security questionnaire: Key contents
If you’re evaluating vendors before a new business relationship, it’s essential to first create a security questionnaire to cover all areas your security team deems important.
Ideally, a security questionnaire should have all the data your organization needs to get insight into a prospective vendor’s security policies and procedures. It should cover topics related to their organization’s compliance with legal and industry-specific regulations such as ISO 27001, SOC 2, or NIST CSF. Most questionnaires collect information about operational continuity and incident response plans as well, as they are strong indicators of security resilience.
Some of the key security aspects addressed by a typical questionnaire include the following:
- Data security
- Access controls
- Application security
- Disaster recovery
- Physical security
- Internal risk management
- Third-party risk management
- Compliance, accreditations, and certifications
{{cta_withimage10="/cta-modules"}} | Shift Left: How to Turn Security into Revenue
What are security questionnaires used for?
A security questionnaire is a useful tool during any procurement or similar process that requires comprehensive due diligence. Besides sending out questionnaires to partners and other third parties as you scale, you’ll also receive security questionnaires from prospects—let’s explore the individual use cases below.
Sending out security questionnaires: Use cases
The following table outlines the three key use cases of sending security questionnaires to vendors:
Receiving security questionnaires: Use cases
For organizations that receive security questionnaires from their prospects, these tools have the following use cases:
4 popular industry-standard security questionnaires
Various authoritative bodies have developed industry-standard questionnaires that organizations implement in internal or external due diligence processes. The four most popular options are:
- CAIQ
- VSAQ
- SIG
- CIS Critical Security Controls
1. CAIQ
The Consensus Assessment Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) is a comprehensive questionnaire that accompanies the Cloud Security Alliance’s Cloud Control Matrix (CCM), a security framework for cloud computing. It’s mainly used by SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS organizations that wish to assess and document existing security controls.
The latest version of the CAIQ is v4. It includes 261 questions spread across the following 17 control families:
- A&A: Audit & Assurance
- AIS: Application & interface security
- BCR: Business continuity management and operational resilience
- CCC: Change control and configuration management
- CEK: Cryptography, encryption & key management
- DCS: Datacenter security
- DSP: Data security and privacy lifecycle management
- GRC: Governance, risk and compliance
- HRS: Human resources
- IAM: Identity & access management
- IPY: Interoperability & portability
- IVS: Infrastructure & virtualization security
- LOG: Logging and monitoring
- SEF: Security incident management, e-discovery, & cloud forensics
- STA: Supply chain management, transparency, and accountability
- TVM: Threat & vulnerability management
- UEM: Universal endpoint management
Besides the complete CAIQ, you can opt for the condensed version, CAIQ Lite. It contains 124 questions, making it useful for security reviews conducted in a time crunch. Both options can be downloaded from the Cloud Security Alliance website for free.
2. VSAQ
The Vendor Security Alliance (VSA) created VSAQ to help organizations standardize their vendor security processes and reviews. It encompasses various questions split into eight categories:
- Service overview
- Data protection & access controls
- Policies & standards
- Proactive security
- Reactive security
- Software supply chain
- Customer-facing application security
- Compliance
These categories fall under the VSAQ-Full questionnaire. If you want the simplified version, you can also choose the VSA-CORE questionnaire, which allows you to address queries under the following five subsets:
- Service introduction
- Data inventory
- Security CORE controls
- USA privacy
- GDPR privacy
Both versions of the VSAQ are available as downloadable Excel files, which you can access for free on the VSA website.
{{cta_webinar5="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation webinar
3. SIG
The Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire was developed by Shared Assessments and is primarily focused on vendor risk assessments (VRAs) and third-party risk management (TPRM). The questionnaire aims to collect data across 21 risk areas:
- Access control
- Application security
- Artificial intelligence (AI)
- Asset and information management
- Cloud hosting services
- Compliance management
- Cybersecurity incident management
- Endpoint security
- Enterprise risk management
- Environmental, social, governance (ESG)
- Human resources security
- Information assurance
- IT operations management
- Network security
- Nth party management
- Operational resilience
- Physical and environmental security
- Privacy management
- Server security
- Supply chain risk management (SCRM)
- Threat management
The questionnaire is quite thorough and can be highly useful for ensuring secure vendor relationships. You can buy the SIG questionnaire on the Shared Assessments website—the licenses start at $6,500 per year.
4. CIS Critical Security Controls
The Center for Internet Security or CIS released Critical Security Controls as a set of security best practices applicable to organizations across industries. At the time of writing, CIS Controls v8.1 is the latest version available, and it covers 18 controls:
- Inventory and control of enterprise assets
- Inventory and control of software assets
- Data protection
- Secure configuration of enterprise assets and software
- Account management
- Access control management
- Continuous vulnerability management
- Audit log management
- Email and web browser protections
- Malware defenses
- Data recovery
- Network infrastructure management
- Network monitoring and defense
- Security awareness and skills training
- Service provider management
- Application software security
- Incident response management
- Penetration testing
You can download CIS Controls v8.1 on the CIS website after providing information about your organization. If you plan on using it for internal purposes, you can also access the CIS Controls Self-Assessment Tool (CIS CSAT) as a free web application.
{{cta_withimage17="/cta-modules"}} | State of Trust Report
3 tips for responding to security questionnaires
As a vendor, answering security questionnaires can be a time- and resource-consuming process, especially if your team has to complete multiple questionnaires every month manually. If questionnaires aren’t completed in a timely manner—or with clear, succinct information—it will delay deal cycles and hinder your growth opportunities. To avoid such blocks and make your process more efficient, consider the following tips:
- Understand your security posture thoroughly
- Consider building a knowledge base
- Automate questionnaire responses as much as possible
1. Understand your security posture thoroughly
You shouldn’t wait to receive a security questionnaire to start thinking about your security posture.
Last-minute evaluations significantly impact your ability to respond to multiple questionnaires. If you get a considerable stream of leads, you may not be able to keep up with all their individual security questionnaire requirements. For instance, you may be unable to tailor your security posture for a particular prospect—as a result, deals may fall through and hurt your bottom line.
It’s also good to be proactive about assessing and improving your security posture regardless of your prospects. A complete understanding of your security infrastructure is essential for many reasons beyond closing deals, most notably:
- Threat prevention and risk mitigation
- Compliance management
- Undisrupted business continuity
Another best practice is to perform regular security reviews and monitor your controls continuously so that you’re informed and ready to complete new questionnaires on short notice.
2. Build a knowledge base
You’ll most likely complete numerous questionnaires as you pursue new deals and scale your security controls. You may find repetitive queries across different questionnaires, and having a knowledge base will serve as a common reference point for your responses.
To keep all the necessary data in one place, you can create a knowledge base containing the following items:
- Information about your IT assets
- Common responses to security questions
- Relevant compliance information and documents
- Details about your questionnaire completion workflow
You can build the knowledge base with any new useful information as you complete more questionnaires. This will lower your learning curve and make future questionnaires easier to complete.
Your knowledge base should be centralized and accessible to all relevant team members. It’s best to avoid scattered spreadsheets, documents, and email chains for information exchange because they tend to complicate your workflows with additional tasks like manual data checks and maintenance.
A much better alternative is to use a dedicated software solution that unifies all your security data and lets you pull relevant information quickly.
3. Automate questionnaire responses as much as possible
Security questionnaire completion requires extensive evidence collection, which can be time-consuming if done manually. Combined with other tasks involved in the process, it might create undue pressure on security teams—especially if filling out questionnaires can lengthen deal cycles and slow down sales efforts.
While a knowledge base can streamline questionnaire responses to an extent, you’ll want to go a step further and automate different processes. You can explore an automation solution that can draw from your documentation on policies, controls, and compliance and populate at least some parts of the questionnaire without your direct input.
The best automation solutions available use AI and integrations to automatically generate questionnaire responses. Some platforms also offer pre-filled templates that you can customize for your specific needs.
{{cta_testimonial16="/cta-modules"}} | ComplyCube customer story
Automate security questionnaires effortlessly with Vanta
Vanta is a trust management platform that can accelerate your security questionnaire workflows, freeing up time for your security team to focus on other high-value tasks.
You can use Vanta’s dedicated Questionnaire Automation product to answer questionnaires 5x faster. It can streamline your workflow through many useful features, such as:
- Centralized security knowledge base: Vanta lets you keep all security information, including already answered questionnaires and updated compliance reports, in one place so that you can access it readily.
- AI-enabled responses: When you first receive a questionnaire, Vanta will draw from the knowledge base to automatically generate responses to questions, which you can review and approve. Vanta’s AI-generated responses have a 95% acceptance rate.
- Multi-format questionnaire completion: Prospects might send questionnaires in different formats, and Vanta lets you complete them without any compatibility issues.
With Vanta, you get up to 73% coverage across security questionnaires, so answering them gets considerably easier even if their volume surges.
Request a custom demo to get a personalized overview of the product from Vanta experts.
If you’re looking to proactively build trust with prospects, you’ll also want to explore Vanta’s Trust Center. It's a unified hub for your security and compliance information that you can share to build trust with your customers and stakeholders. With Trust Center, Vanta customers have seen:
- 87 percent of security reviews deflected
- 93 percent of access approvals automated
- 86 percent of NDA collection automated
Watch this webinar to get hands-on tips on how to make the most of Vanta's Trust Center.
{{cta_simple13="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation product page
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