What is the difference between SIG and CAIQ?
SIG, the Standardized Information Gathering questionnaire from Shared Assessments, is a general-purpose third-party risk form used heavily in financial services, healthcare, and large enterprises. It ships in SIG Lite and SIG Core sizes, with Core reaching close to 1,000 questions across 18 risk domains. CAIQ, the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire from the Cloud Security Alliance, is narrower and cloud-focused. CAIQ v4 has roughly 260 yes-or-no questions mapped to the CSA Cloud Controls Matrix, aimed at cloud-service providers answering cloud-native buyers. Mature vendors keep answers ready for both.
Who inside a vendor owns the security questionnaire?
The authoritative owner is the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) team or the information security team, depending on how the vendor is structured. They hold the control narratives, the evidence library, and the audit history that the answers draw on. Sales owns intake and return (routing the request from the buyer and sending the response back), legal reconciles the answers with the contract, and subject-matter experts in engineering, HR, and operations answer the questions outside the library. The AE is the project manager, not the author.
How long does a security questionnaire usually take to complete?
It varies by form, by preparation, and by how many novel questions the buyer sends. A well-prepared vendor with a current evidence library can turn a CAIQ in a day or two, a SIG Lite in two to five days, and a full SIG Core or a 500-question custom list in one to three weeks. Vendors without a library often spend four to eight weeks on the same request, because every question becomes an original research project. Response time is a real deal variable, not a back-office metric.
Can a SOC 2 report replace a security questionnaire?
Sometimes, rarely in full. A current SOC 2 Type II report (plus a bridge letter for any gap) answers many of the control questions a buyer would otherwise ask, and mature buyers accept the report in lieu of large sections of their questionnaire. But most buyers still send a questionnaire alongside the report, both to cover controls the SOC 2 scope did not include and to get vendor-specific answers on data residency, subprocessors, and incident history. A SOC 2 is leverage, not an exemption.
What is a vendor security assessment versus a security questionnaire?
A security questionnaire is one piece of a broader vendor security assessment. The assessment is the full pre-contract review process a buyer runs on a prospective vendor: it typically includes the questionnaire, a review of audit reports (SOC 2, ISO 27001), a privacy review and DPA, sometimes a penetration-test summary or an architecture call, and increasingly a continuous-monitoring rating from a third party like SecurityScorecard or BitSight. The questionnaire is the structured document; the assessment is the end-to-end workflow.
What happens if a vendor fails a security questionnaire?
The outcomes range from a redline on the contract to a dead deal, depending on the finding. A missing control that the vendor can commit to adding within a defined window often turns into a contractual security addendum with milestones and reporting obligations. A material gap (no encryption on primary data, no incident response plan, no SOC 2 or equivalent) usually kills the deal or sends the buyer back to shortlist alternatives. A buyer will almost always disclose which answer triggered the escalation, which is useful intelligence for the vendor's roadmap.
Do small B2B vendors have to answer security questionnaires?
Any vendor selling to a buyer with a vendor-risk program is likely to see one, regardless of size. The threshold is usually set by data sensitivity and spend, not by vendor headcount. A ten-person SaaS startup selling into a Fortune 500 buyer will see the full SIG. The pragmatic answer for small vendors is to invest early in the control narratives and evidence library (and ideally a SOC 2 Type II), because the first enterprise questionnaire shows up long before the team feels ready for one.
How should the CRM support security questionnaire workflow?
A CRM supports the workflow by letting the AE log the questionnaire against the opportunity, route the task to GRC with a due date, attach the completed response and supporting evidence to the record, and track response-time metrics across all open requests. The questionnaire does not live in the CRM as a document editor; it lives in an evidence tool or portal. But the status, the owner, the deadline, and the final response belong on the opportunity so the deal and the review stay synchronized.
