Security Questionnaire Templates
Three CSV templates, free and ungated: a 40-question security questionnaire starter with answer guidance, a 30-row CAIQ-style answer scaffold, and a 35-question vendor risk questionnaire you can send to your own vendors.
Direct CSV downloads — no signup, no tracking pixels in the files01The templates
Plain UTF-8 CSV. Opens in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers, or imports into your GRC tool.
Security Questionnaire Starter
The questions customers actually ask, SIG-Lite style: organizational security, access control, encryption, incident response, BC/DR, vendor management, privacy, and secure development. Each row includes practical answer guidance (what a strong answer states, what to avoid claiming) and the evidence file a reviewer will typically ask for next. Use it to pre-draft your canonical answers once, before the first real questionnaire lands.
CAIQ-Style Answer Scaffold
Original questions covering the same domains as the CSA CAIQ-Lite — AIS, BCR, CCC, DSP, GRC, HRS, IAM, IVS, LOG, SEF, STA, and TVM — each with a suggested answer structure: what to assert, what to cite, and which dates or metrics to include. This is not the official CAIQ (that's copyrighted by the Cloud Security Alliance); it's a scaffold so your answers are ready when the real one arrives.
Vendor Risk Questionnaire (Outbound)
For the other side of the table: a questionnaire you send to your vendors. Covers company and governance, data handling, access control, security operations, business continuity, subcontractors, compliance, and development practices. Each question carries a risk weight (1-5) and a red-flag answer, so a non-specialist can score the response and know when to escalate.
02How to use these
- Build your answer library before the first questionnaire arrives. Open the starter template, draft your organization's answer for each of the 40 questions, and store it somewhere the whole team can find. Eighty percent of every inbound questionnaire is a rephrasing of these rows.
- Answer with specifics, not adjectives. The guidance column shows the pattern: name the tool, quote the SLA, give the date of the last test or review. "We take security seriously" loses deals; "MFA enforced via Okta on all production access, quarterly access reviews, last completed 2026-05" wins them.
- Attach evidence proactively. The Evidence To Attach column lists what reviewers ask for next. Sending the policy excerpt or report with the answer cuts a review round-trip.
- For the vendor questionnaire, score before you send. Decide your thresholds up front — e.g., any 5-weight red flag triggers escalation; total weighted score above 20 requires remediation commitments in the contract. Trim sections that don't apply to the vendor's service.
- Keep answers dated and owned. Add an "owner" and "last verified" column to any of these files. Stale answers are how questionnaires turn into incidents.
03When templates stop scaling
A spreadsheet answer library works brilliantly — up to a point. The breaking pattern is always the same: questionnaire volume grows, every customer uses a different format (portal, XLSX, SIG, CAIQ, custom DDQ), the canonical answers drift out of date, and copy-paste introduces errors that a customer's security team catches. At a few questionnaires per month, the spreadsheet becomes the bottleneck.
That's the point where teams move the answer library into a system that maintains it. LukaGRC's AI drafts questionnaire answers from your own knowledge base, policies, and evidence — never from speculation — and every drafted answer carries a citation back to the source document, so your reviewer verifies instead of writing from scratch. Read how AI questionnaire answering works, or start a free trial and import these CSVs as your starting knowledge base.
Stop re-typing the same 40 answers.
LukaGRC answers SIG, CAIQ, VSA, and DDQ questionnaires from your own KB with citations a human can verify. 7-day free trial, no credit card, transparent per-user pricing.
Start free trial →Common questions
Are these templates really free?
Yes — free and ungated, no email or signup. Use them internally, adapt them, or send them to vendors. They're released CC-BY style: attribution to LukaGRC is appreciated if you republish them, but not required for internal use.
Is the CAIQ-style template the official CSA CAIQ?
No. The official CAIQ is published by the Cloud Security Alliance and is copyrighted. Our scaffold uses original questions we wrote covering the same domains, so your answer structures transfer when a customer sends the real thing. Download the official CAIQ from cloudsecurityalliance.org.
What format are the files in?
Plain CSV (UTF-8, comma-separated, quoted fields). They open directly in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers, and import cleanly into most GRC platforms including LukaGRC.
Can I send the vendor risk questionnaire to vendors as-is?
Yes — it's designed as an outbound assessment. Trim sections that don't apply to the vendor's service, and decide your scoring thresholds before sending.
How do I score responses with the risk weights?
A simple method: for each response at or near the red-flag answer, add the question's weight to a running total. Any single 5-weight red flag triggers escalation; a total above your threshold (20 is a reasonable start) requires remediation commitments before signature.
Do these cover SIG or SIG-Lite?
The starter covers the same ground a SIG-Lite assessment covers, using original questions. The official SIG is licensed by Shared Assessments; this is a starter in the same style, not a copy.