What is a Cybersecurity Questionnaire?

The Okta and MOVEit supply chain attacks highlighted the challenge vendors face in securing their vendors and third parties. As organizations increasingly outsource to fourth and even fifth parties, supply chains have grown more complex, vendor dependencies have deepened, and cyber threats have evolved at a rapid pace. In fact, up to 60% of attacks now involve the supply chain, and according to Kaspersky, it has become the most frequent attack vector in 2023.

One essential tool for identifying and managing this risk is the cybersecurity questionnaire. A cybersecurity questionnaire is a structured set of questions used to assess the security posture of a vendor or third party. It helps organizations evaluate whether potential or existing partners have appropriate safeguards, policies, and protocols in place to protect sensitive data and systems.

As vendor ecosystems grow and attack surfaces expand, cybersecurity questionnaires are no longer optional, they’re a cornerstone of modern third-party risk management (TPRM) strategies. This article explores what cybersecurity questionnaires are, why they matter, what they should include, and how to create and automate them effectively. Whether you’re just getting started or looking to strengthen an existing process, this guide provides a practical roadmap for improving how your organization assesses and manages third-party cyber risk.

Purpose of the Cybersecurity Questionnaire

A cybersecurity questionnaire is a vendor-facing risk assessment document used to evaluate a third party’s security posture and compliance readiness. It is designed to surface key insights into how vendors manage data, mitigate risk, and implement security best practices. These questionnaires typically include questions on policies, technical controls, regulatory compliance, incident response protocols, and more, providing a foundational view into the vendor’s ability to safeguard sensitive systems and information.

Unlike a broader vendor questionnaire, which may include questions about operational performance, legal standing, or financial viability, a cybersecurity questionnaire zeroes in on information security. It offers self-reported insights from the vendor’s security, compliance, or IT leaders, helping organizations gauge potential vulnerabilities and risk exposure.

These assessments play a critical role in achieving several broader objectives: reducing supply chain risk, ensuring alignment with business continuity and disaster recovery plans, and meeting industry-specific regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, or NYDFS. Ultimately, a cybersecurity questionnaire enables organizations to make informed decisions about which vendors to trust, onboard, or monitor more closely.

Why Use a Cybersecurity Questionnaire?

Cybersecurity questionnaires are a critical component of third-party risk management (TPRM) programs. They enable organizations to identify and evaluate risks before entering into a business relationship, or to reassess existing vendors as circumstances change. These questionnaires provide insight into how a vendor handles sensitive data, whether they have formal incident response procedures, and how well they adhere to internal policies and external compliance requirements.

With increasing regulatory pressure, organizations must demonstrate due diligence in vendor selection and oversight. Cybersecurity questionnaires help support compliance with frameworks such as GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and NIST, offering a structured method to document risk assessments and fulfill audit requirements.

In addition to managing risk, these questionnaires help build trust. By encouraging transparency, they lay the foundation for collaborative relationships with vendors, where expectations around security, privacy, and accountability are clearly established from the outset.

As vendor ecosystems expand, cybersecurity questionnaires also bring scalability. They enable organizations to conduct standardized, repeatable assessments across a large and growing number of third parties, without sacrificing depth or rigor. In this way, organizations can efficiently reduce risk exposure while maintaining operational agility and regulatory alignment.

What Topics Does a Cybersecurity Questionnaire Cover?

• Internal risk management policy: Assesses whether the vendor has a structured approach to identifying, analyzing, and responding to internal security risks.
• Third-party risk management policy: Evaluates how the vendor manages and monitors the security practices of its own vendors and subcontractors (fourth and fifth parties).
• Frequency and effectivity of employee training: Ensures employees are regularly trained on cybersecurity protocols and can recognize threats such as phishing or social engineering.
• Business continuity plan and disaster recovery of the vendor in the event of an attack: Measures preparedness to maintain operations and recover quickly after a cyber incident or outage.
• Business resiliency plan of the vendor to proactively defend against operational disruptions in advance: Reviews proactive strategies to prevent disruptions before they occur, ensuring critical functions can continue during adverse conditions.
• Ability to detect unauthorized access to data: Determines how effectively a vendor can identify breaches or unauthorized activities across systems.
• Time organization is required to notify customers in the event of a breach or security incident: Checks compliance with breach notification requirements, which are critical for legal and reputational risk mitigation.
• Data encryption methods both in-rest and in transit: Validates whether the vendor uses encryption to safeguard data both while being stored and during transmission.
• Compliance with data privacy regulations: Confirms whether the vendor meets key privacy laws like GDPR, CCPA, or HIPAA depending on geography and industry.
• Security adjustments for office and remote work: Ensures the vendor has controls in place to protect data and systems across hybrid or remote work environments. 
• The adherence of specific regulations relevant to the vendor or third party (e.g. HIPAA, PCI DSS or GDPR): Checks if the vendor complies with industry-specific regulations relevant to your organization or customers.
• Identification and process for vulnerability and patch management: Assesses how quickly and effectively the vendor identifies, prioritizes, and addresses security flaws in its systems.
• Data protection and data privacy management: Reviews policies and controls for safeguarding personal and sensitive data throughout its lifecycle.
• Application and cloud security: Evaluates security measures applied to software and cloud infrastructure to protect against common threats such as misconfigurations or unauthorized access.
• Controls in place for protection of data centers, servers, and physical offices: Ensures physical assets are protected from intrusion, theft, or natural disasters, complementing digital security measures.

Creating an Effective Cybersecurity Questionnaire

An effective security questionnaire starts with a goal: What are the risks the organization is seeking to minimize as they would create the biggest impact and operational disruption if they occur? Security questionnaires should be based on identifying these critical risks and developing questions designed to evaluate the potential of those risks. They should also be different for each industry, type of organization, and employee role.  For example, vendors should receive different questions than third-party vendors, and cloud-based service organizations should have more questions related to cloud security. HR managers should not receive questionnaires that are as technical as IT managers.

Security questionnaires are also only valid for a specific point in time, as the answers to the questionnaire change based on network dynamics, evolving risks, and third-party supply chains. For this reason, security questionnaires are only effective when they are conducted on a regular basis.

How to Create and Deploy an Effective Cybersecurity Questionnaire 

To ensure cybersecurity questionnaires drive meaningful insight, and don’t become an administrative burden, organizations must align their design and delivery with both internal priorities and vendor realities.

1. Align with Business Objectives & Risk Appetite: Start by identifying the types of risk your organization is most concerned about. Whether it’s protecting sensitive customer data, maintaining uptime for critical services, or complying with industry regulations, the questionnaire should be crafted to reflect those business goals and your organization’s overall risk tolerance.
2. Customize Based on Vendor Tiering: Not all vendors pose the same level of risk. Tailor the questionnaire’s depth and complexity based on the vendor’s criticality, data access, and service impact. A high-risk cloud provider may require detailed technical scrutiny, while a low-risk vendor may only need to answer a basic checklist.
3. Use Structured Questions When Possible: Combining yes/no, multiple-choice, and open-ended formats makes responses easier to analyze and compare. Include evidence-based questions (ex, attach a recent SOC 2 report) to validate claims and reduce ambiguity.
4. Incorporate Automation & Reminders: Leverage tools that automate questionnaire delivery, track completion status, send reminders, and flag overdue responses. This ensures timely responses and reduces manual effort across teams.
5. Enable Response Reuse: Let vendors reuse responses from previously submitted questionnaires where appropriate. Through portals or document libraries, this not only speeds up the process for recurring assessments but also improves response consistency and accuracy.

A well-designed questionnaire process helps organizations scale their third-party risk management (TPRM) efforts while maintaining flexibility and depth in security assessments.

Industry-Standard Cybersecurity Questionnaire

Frameworks exist, such as the NIST framework, that organizations can use as a foundation for their cybersecurity questionnaires. For example, they can structure their questions around the five NIS core functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover, with categories and subcategories under each function. The NIST CF includes standards for third-party risk management.

The ISO 27000 series framework includes security controls for your information security management system (ISMS) and is specific to third-party risk management. Organizations can align their cybersecurity questionnaires similarly to how they would with the NIST framework, based on clauses and controls within the framework.

Many questionnaires have templates that function as questionnaires for their industry. For example, the Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ) is a set of yes or no questions designed to evaluate 133 control objectives structured across 16 domains that cover key aspects of cloud technology. It is designed to measure an organization’s compliance with the Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM), which is the CSA’s cybersecurity control framework. The Standardized Information Gathering Questionnaire (SIG) is a repository of third-party information security and privacy questions indexed to multiple regulations and control frameworks. For example, the SIG Core Questionnaire is a set of 855 questions that encompass all 19 risk controls.

Major Compliance Requirements for Cybersecurity Questionnaires

Another important aspect of a cybersecurity questionnaire is its ability to evaluate the vendor or their party’s adherence to compliance. Many organizations are required to meet specific compliance in their industry, such as HIPAA compliance for healthcare organizations and NYDFS for financial organizations either located in or dealing with customers in the New York State area. Many regulations also have specific requirements, such as mandatory penetration testing, employee awareness training, reporting data breaches to customers within a specific amount of time, and maintaining comprehensive records of all efforts related to compliance.

Recently, regulations such as DORA, NYDFS and the NIS Directive have included adherence of not just the organization but their third parties. In addition, regulatory bodies are starting to develop regulations focused on enforcing the ethical and response use of artificial intelligence in technologies.

Create a Custom Cybersecurity Questionnaire

Since many aspects of cybersecurity are depending on the vendor, the industry, the relevant regulations, the evolving technology and threat landscape – and the critical risks the organization is mitigating against – security questionnaires must be customized for each vendor. They must also align with different, and often evolving, business goals for each organization. In addition, different vendors and third parties have different access to sensitive data and therefore demand different questions based on how it interacts with this data.

Due to the dynamic nature of IT infrastructure, third party and vendor outsourcing of services, and evolving cybersecurity threats, these security questionnaires should be updated regularly to stay as accurate as possible.

Automate the Cybersecurity Questionnaire Process

Customizing cybersecurity questionnaires for each vendor manually can be quite tedious. Automating the process allows organizations to easily scale the process while at the same time maintaining the flexibility needed to adapt to changes when necessary. In addition, these capabilities can be easily integrated with the collection of data and its analysis in real time, as well as risk management, security and compliance tools.

Automation also frees up organizational resources to allocate them to higher value tasks, such as mitigating incidents in real-time. Additional benefits of automating cybersecurity questionnaires is that it ensures greater accuracy as it eliminates human error, and facilitates greater communication between teams with real-time alerts, updates and collaboration tools.

What Happens After You Receive the Cybersecurity Questionnaire? 

Receiving a completed cybersecurity questionnaire marks an important milestone in the third-party risk management (TPRM) process, but it’s only the beginning. To extract actionable insights and drive meaningful risk reduction, organizations need a structured, cross-functional approach to analyzing and responding to the information provided.

Start by conducting a comprehensive review for red flags or gaps. Subject matter experts (SMEs) from security, compliance, and legal teams should assess the responses for completeness, clarity, and risk signals. Look for vague language, missing data, or the absence of key controls like encryption, incident response plans, or access controls. Next, score or tier the vendor based on risk. Use a standardized scoring framework to evaluate the severity of findings and assign a risk level. This helps prioritize follow-up actions and determine whether the vendor can proceed, needs mitigation, or should be reconsidered altogether.

It’s also essential to validate claims with evidence. Self-reported data should be supported with documentation such as SOC 2 reports, vulnerability assessments, penetration test summaries, or internal security policies. When issues are identified, track remediation and follow-up. Use a risk register or TPRM platform to assign owners, define timelines, and monitor progress toward resolution. Documenting this process is critical for audits and internal governance.

Finally, incorporate results into ongoing monitoring. Feed questionnaire insights into vendor dashboards, procurement systems, re-assessment cycles, and performance reviews. The goal is to ensure that risk posture isn’t evaluated once and forgotten, but remains part of an adaptive, continuous monitoring strategy. By operationalizing questionnaire findings, organizations transform a static assessment into a dynamic risk management tool that informs smarter decisions and strengthens the overall vendor ecosystem.

Cybersecurity Questionnaire Challenges to Consider

While cybersecurity questionnaires are essential tools for assessing third-party risk, they are not without limitations. Understanding these challenges is key to making the process more effective and resilient.

• Self-reported limitations are a primary concern. Vendors may unintentionally overstate their capabilities or provide outdated information. In some cases, there may be intentional misrepresentation. Relying solely on self-attestation creates blind spots and underscores the need for independent validation and external assessments.
• Overly long or generic questionnaires can also reduce effectiveness. If the questionnaire is not tailored to the vendor’s role, size, or risk profile, it can overwhelm respondents and lead to vague or incomplete answers. Tailoring the scope ensures you get meaningful data without adding unnecessary friction.
• Stale data is another issue. Vendor environments and threat landscapes evolve rapidly. A questionnaire completed months ago may no longer reflect the vendor’s current risk posture. That’s why continuous reassessment and monitoring are critical components of a robust TPRM strategy.

Finally, a lack of internal ownership often weakens follow-through. Without clear collaboration between procurement, infosec, legal, and compliance teams, risk signals may be missed or left unaddressed. Shared accountability and defined workflows are essential for acting on findings and maintaining security standards across the vendor ecosystem.

Continuous Improvement and Modern Best Practices 

The most effective cybersecurity questionnaire programs are not static. They evolve continuously alongside threats, regulations, and business needs. Rather than treating questionnaires as a once-a-year checkbox, integrate continuous monitoring tools that provide real-time insight into vendor risk. These may include external risk ratings, attack surface intelligence, or breach monitoring tools that supplement self-reported data.

Enhance assessments by combining internal responses with third-party risk signals. This hybrid approach gives you a more accurate, actionable picture of each vendor’s risk profile.

Finally, measure and refine your process over time. Track metrics such as average response time, questionnaire completion rates, percentage of vendors with identified risks, and time to resolution. These insights help you identify bottlenecks, improve workflows, and demonstrate the ROI of your TPRM program year after year. Continuous improvement ensures your cybersecurity questionnaires remain an adaptive, high-impact part of your vendor risk strategy.

Are Cybersecurity Questionnaires Enough on Their Own?

Since security questionnaires are only one type of risk management tool, they only deliver a specific view of certain aspects of vendor security. They should be used in conjunction with a comprehensive risk management that includes the use of a third-party risk management platform.

Panorays is a third-party management platform that delivers contextual cyber management customized for each business relationship. By mapping the full threat landscape and continuously monitoring and reassessing the Risk DNA of each business connection, we pinpoint early threats indications within the unique business context of every relationship, enabling companies to adapt their defenses, minimize risk and proactively prevent the next breach from affecting their business.

Risk DNA includes accurate external assessments that map and analyze third party digital assets for vulnerabilities and control failures, breach history, human risks (such as compromised credentials) and KEVs alone with other details. External assessments are then combined with internal assessments that include dynamic cybersecurity questionnaires customized according to the company profiling and risk tolerance. These AI-powered cybersecurity questionnaires supply answers to questions based on vendor documentation (SOC2, certifications and external public assets) to validate all responses. Together these assessments deliver the most accurate cyber rating on the market for each of your third party relationships. 

Ready to learn more about automated cybersecurity questionnaires customized for each vendor relationship? Get a demo of our third party risk management platform today.

Cybersecurity Questionnaire FAQs