How to answer a SIG questionnaire without a GRC team

TL;DR

• SIG Lite covers roughly 170 questions across 18 domains; most map directly to policies, SOC 2 controls, and configurations you already have documented
• The longest sections (Access Control, Incident Management) are repetitive, not technically complex
• A 1-2 person team with a pre-built source pack can work through SIG Lite in 3-4 hours of focused effort
• AI auto-fill handles around 70% of SIG Lite questions on first pass; the remaining 30% are a predictable set you can prepare for in advance
• Knowing which sections require human judgment before the questionnaire arrives is the difference between a morning sprint and a two-week fire drill

When a large enterprise wants to assess you as a vendor, they can write their own security questionnaire or use a standardized framework that maps consistently across all their vendors. Most procurement teams with a real third-party risk program choose the latter.

The Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire, published by Shared Assessments, is the most widely used of those frameworks. It covers 18 risk domains in a consistent format, which means a buyer's risk team can compare your answers against fifty other vendors on the same scale without having to normalize their data.

The incentive behind sending SIGs has grown stronger. Third-party involvement in data breaches doubled to 15% of system intrusion incidents in the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, which is part of why procurement functions now run structured assessments on vendors that touch sensitive systems, not just informal reference checks.

For you as the vendor, the SIG is actually good news. It is predictable. The same 18 domains appear every time. If you've answered one SIG Lite, your answers largely carry forward to the next one.

The SIG Lite spans 18 domains labeled A through R. Not every domain has the same weight. Before sitting down to answer, it helps to know which sections are short versus involved.

The heavier domains in SIG Lite:

• H (Access Control): Identity management, SSO, MFA enforcement, privileged access, user provisioning and deprovisioning. Long but almost entirely answerable from your IdP configuration and access control policy.
• L (Compliance, Regulations, Standards, and Privacy): Applicable regulations, compliance certifications, and audit history. If you have a SOC 2 report, this section moves fast.
• J (Cybersecurity Incident Management): Incident response plan, escalation procedures, breach notification obligations, tabletop exercise history.
• P (Third-Party Management): How you assess your own vendors. This section catches small teams off guard because it requires a vendor risk program, not just policies about your own stack.
• K (Operational Resilience): Business continuity, disaster recovery, RTO/RPO documentation. A paragraph in a policy doc is not enough here.

The lighter domains (A, B, C, E, F, M, N) each have under 10 questions in the Lite version and pull mainly from your security policy and org chart.

Access Control (H) and Third-Party Management (P) consistently take the longest for teams without a dedicated GRC function.

Access Control is long because it has 30-40 sub-questions in most Lite versions and asks about both policy and technical implementation. The answers themselves are not hard, but each sub-question needs a specific, verifiable response. "Do you enforce MFA for all administrative accounts?" requires a yes or no plus an evidence pointer, not a paragraph of explanation.

Third-Party Management is hard for a different reason. Most early-stage SaaS companies do not have a formal vendor risk program. If you have been using AWS, Stripe, and Intercom without a documented assessment process, you will need to write one before answering Section P honestly.

On the questionnaires we process, Access Control takes an average of 45-60 minutes to complete manually and drops to under 10 minutes with auto-fill from real source documentation. Third-Party Management is the inverse: it is shorter in the Lite version but requires judgment that auto-fill cannot fully replace.

The biggest time sink in a SIG response is hunting for documentation after you have already started answering. You open a question, realize you need the pen test report, realize it is in someone's email from 18 months ago.

Build your source pack before the questionnaire lands. At minimum:

Security policies (written, dated): You need at least an information security policy, an access control policy, and an incident response plan. If you have a SOC 2 Type II report, many buyers treat it as policy evidence. If you do not, the policies do not need to be long, but they need to exist as named documents.

SOC 2 report or equivalent audit evidence: Section L will move in 15 minutes if you have a SOC 2 to reference. Without it, expect to pull audit artifacts from multiple places.

Pen test report (last 12 months): Section I (Application Security) and several Access Control sub-questions ask directly about penetration testing cadence and findings. A dated report with a remediation summary answers most of these.

Architecture and data flow diagram: Helps with network security, cloud hosting, and data classification questions across multiple domains.

Vendor inventory with risk classifications: Needed for Section P. Even a spreadsheet of your Tier 1 vendors with a brief rationale is better than nothing.

Based on what we see on SIG Lites processed through Wolfia, the rough breakdown of time with documentation in place versus without looks like this:

These are working estimates for a human reviewing and confirming AI-suggested answers against source documentation. A fully manual pass without organized material runs longer.

AI auto-fill works well when the answer lives in a document you can supply. "Do you use MFA?" can be answered from an access control policy or a SOC 2 report. "What is your RTO?" can be answered from a BCP document. "Do you conduct annual security training?" can be answered from an HR policy or a SOC 2 control narrative.

It works less well when the question is about process maturity that is not written down anywhere. "Describe your vendor risk assessment process" requires either a documented vendor risk program or a human to write one on the spot. Auto-fill will surface a placeholder but it will not invent a real program where none exists.

The questions that reliably require human input in SIG Lite:

• Third-party risk program maturity (Section P)
• DR and BCP test frequency and most recent test results (Section K)
• Specific named personnel for security roles (Section C)
• Incident response tabletop exercise history (Section J)
• Data retention and disposal specifics tied to your product (Section O)

These are not surprises. They are the same questions that slow down every under-resourced team. Knowing how to prioritize questionnaire responses when you're understaffed matters as much here as raw speed.

Yes, with one caveat: you need to front-load the policy work.

The SIG Lite is designed for broad vendor coverage, not to catch small companies without formal compliance programs. Its questions reflect baseline security hygiene, not GRC program maturity. If you have a SOC 2 report (even Type I), an incident response plan, an access control policy, and some evidence of pen testing, you can answer the vast majority honestly.

The caveat is Section P. A vendor assessment program is something buyers genuinely check. If you are answering "no" to every third-party risk management question, that is a flag even in the Lite version. A minimal vendor inventory with risk tiers is worth an hour of setup before you ever see a SIG.

For teams handling their first enterprise questionnaire, the guide to answering security questionnaires without a security team walks through the policy gaps most commonly flagged by reviewers.

Wolfia is built for security and GRC teams handling exactly this workflow. When you upload a SIG Lite, the platform maps each question to your uploaded source documents (policies, SOC 2 report, pen test results, architecture diagrams) and generates answers with inline citations showing which document supported each response.

On a typical SIG Lite with documentation loaded, Wolfia auto-fills around 70% of questions on first pass at an accuracy that passes human review without changes. The remaining 30% are flagged for SME input, with the relevant policy section shown alongside for reference so your reviewer is not starting from scratch.

Specific features that matter for SIG workflows:

Source citations on every answer. Every generated response links back to the document and section it came from. Your reviewer sees "answered from SOC 2 Type II report, section CC6.1" rather than a free-standing claim. That citation trail is what a buyer's risk team wants to see if they follow up.

Chrome extension for portal-based SIGs. A portion of enterprise buyers collect SIG responses through procurement portals (OneTrust, Ariba, Coupa, ServiceNow) rather than emailing a spreadsheet. Wolfia's Chrome extension auto-fills portal fields directly, across more than 55 portal platforms, without copy-pasting.

Self-maintaining knowledge base. When you upload a new pen test report or refresh your access control policy, the knowledge base updates automatically. The next SIG you receive pulls from current documentation without any manual re-tagging or library grooming.

Hallucination prevention. Wolfia includes 10+ guardrails that prevent it from generating answers not supported by your source documentation. If a question maps to a gap in your docs, it flags the gap rather than generating a plausible-sounding answer you cannot back up.

For teams evaluating AI tools for questionnaire workflows, understanding how AI accuracy directly affects deal velocity is worth reading before choosing a platform.

A SIG Lite without a GRC team is a solvable problem. The questionnaire is standardized, which means the preparation is standardized too. Build your source pack once: security policies, SOC 2 or equivalent audit evidence, pen test report, architecture diagram, vendor inventory. From there, most of a SIG Lite is retrieval, not judgment.

The sections that require judgment (Third-Party Management, Operational Resilience, Incident Response specifics) are identifiable before you start. If you have documented your vendor program and your BCP, the rest moves fast. If you have not, that is the real work, and it is worth doing before the first questionnaire arrives rather than during it.