Security questionnaire
A security questionnaire is a buyer's structured assessment of a vendor's security posture — controls, policies, certifications, incident history — sent during procurement or vendor review. Standardized forms (SIG, CAIQ) and bespoke spreadsheets alike, they recur relentlessly.
Security questionnaires are procurement's fastest-growing burden: every SaaS purchase now triggers one, formats range from standardized (SIG, CAIQ) to homegrown spreadsheets, and the same three hundred questions arrive rephrased weekly. Their content is evidence-backed fact — control descriptions, policy citations, certification status — which makes accuracy and consistency non-negotiable: answers are compared against your SOC 2 report, your public documentation, and your last submission. The response pattern that scales grounds answers in the current policy corpus with citations, routes genuinely novel or sensitive questions to the security team, and treats every 'we'll fix that answer next time' as a knowledge-base edit, not a memory.
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