I'm trying to get a sense of how much time really goes into filling out vendor security questionnaires. From my experience and from talking to other founders, it often seems like an enterprise buyer sends over a lengthy spreadsheet with 100-150 questions covering topics like encryption, access controls, and incident response. I've noticed that someone on the team usually spends 2-3 days digging through policy documents to gather the necessary information. How do others handle this? Do you have any systems in place? Do you reuse answers from past questionnaires? Is it just as tough each time, or does it get easier?
5 Answers
Honestly, it takes me around 30 minutes these days.
You should really have an Information Security Management System (ISMS) that lays out all the relevant details and responsibilities. I can’t imagine handling other compliance tasks like ISO27001 without a solid document structure—it must be a pain to juggle all that without a formal system in place!
Only the companies slow to adopt AI seem to really struggle with this. Most are using AI tools now, and it can take them just about 2 minutes!
It really speeds up once you have someone in charge of it. I’ve seen teams take a whole three days just trying to locate answers scattered across legal documents, engineering guidelines, and memory. We got it down to under two hours once one organized person kept a shared master sheet with links to evidence and version updates!
I have to do these for HIPAA compliance too, and it’s crucial to have all your documentation organized across departments. Having someone own this process is key. The challenge I face is the variations in wording across different tools—they often ask the same questions but in different terms. I’ve used AI to help with this, but it’s still a bit chaotic with all the different security questionnaires.
Totally agree! It usually takes a few weeks before someone actually takes the lead—but after that, it’s just a matter of copy-pasting.