Vendor Questionnaires: CAIQ vs SIG vs Custom
Every buyer sends a different questionnaire format. Here's what each one actually is, where they overlap, and how to avoid answering the same questions six different ways.
The first time an enterprise buyer sends you a "CAIQ" and a "SIG Lite" in the same week, you'll realize the vendor questionnaire world has standards — and also, everyone's ignoring them.
CAIQ: the cloud-native standard
Published by the Cloud Security Alliance, the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire is the most common format for cloud service providers. Current version (v4.0) has 261 questions across 17 domains. Structured, yes/no-leaning answers with space for clarification. If a buyer sends you a CAIQ, they're probably buying from multiple cloud vendors and using it to normalize assessments.
SIG: the enterprise standard
Shared Assessments' Standardized Information Gathering questionnaire comes in three flavors:
- SIG Lite: ~130 questions, reasonable for most SaaS vendors.
- SIG Core: ~850 questions, for vendors in regulated industries.
- SIG Detailed: 1,600+ questions. If you get this, call your buyer and ask if they're sure.
SIG leans toward risk-based questioning with more open-text fields than CAIQ. More common in finance, healthcare, and large enterprise.
Custom: the wild west
Every buyer who's ever had a bad security experience builds a custom questionnaire. They're usually Excel files with their own column structure, a mix of CAIQ-ish and SIG-ish questions, plus their specific paranoia. These take the longest to answer because there's no template to work from.
The overlap problem
CAIQ and SIG overlap significantly — probably 60–70% of questions are semantically identical, just phrased differently. If you answer CAIQ question 1.2.3 thoughtfully, you can almost always reuse that answer for SIG's equivalent. The hard part is knowing which questions are equivalent.
What to do
Build a questionnaire answer bank organized by topic, not by framework. "Encryption at rest" is a topic. It maps to CAIQ questions, SIG questions, and whatever a custom questionnaire calls it. A good answer bank plus semantic search cuts your time-to-respond by 70%+ regardless of format.
And when a buyer sends you a 1,600-question SIG Detailed: respond with your CAIQ and SIG Lite pre-filled, and ask which of the remaining questions are actually important to them. Nine times out of ten, they'll thank you.
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