SIG Lite vs. CAIQ: Which Vendor Questionnaire Should You Use?
Introduction
If you’ve been on either side of a B2B procurement process in the last decade, you’ve seen a SIG or a CAIQ land in your inbox. They’re the two standard frameworks for vendor security questionnaires, and buyers routinely debate which to use — or whether to issue both.
This post gives you a practitioner’s view: what each framework is, what it measures well, what it misses, and a decision tree for picking the right one.
The quick definitions
1. SIG (Standardized Information Gathering) — maintained by Shared Assessments. Two main flavors: SIG Core (roughly 800+ questions, broad and deep across 18 risk domains) and SIG Lite (~120 questions, high-signal subset). Updated annually.
2. CAIQ (Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire) — maintained by the Cloud Security Alliance. Around 250 questions are mapped to the Cloud Controls Matrix (CCM)—purpose-built for cloud and SaaS vendors.
What each one is best at
SIG Core is the most comprehensive general-purpose questionnaire available — covering cyber, privacy, physical, HR, operational resilience, and third-party governance. Use it for Critical vendors, regulated sectors, or when the buyer needs evidence across the full risk surface.
SIG Lite compresses SIG Core to the most material 120 questions. It’s a fast way to get 80% of the signal for High-tier vendors without overwhelming them.
CAIQ is laser-focused on cloud-specific controls — shared responsibility, multi-tenancy, data residency, and encryption key management. If your vendor is a SaaS/cloud provider, CAIQ asks the right questions.
Decision matrix
1. Critical vendor, regulated sector, broad risk surface — SIG Core + CAIQ.
2. High-tier SaaS vendor — SIG Lite + CAIQ.
3. Pure cloud/SaaS with low data sensitivity — CAIQ alone.
4. High-tier non-cloud vendor (e.g., professional services) — SIG Lite.
5. Medium vendor — internal baseline questionnaire, not SIG/CAIQ.
Common pitfalls
1. Sending SIG Core to a small vendor — they won’t complete it, and you’ll stall for months.
2. Treating CAIQ answers as proof — always request CSA STAR registry entry or a SOC 2 mapping alongside.
3. Never update your questionnaire — SIG and CAIQ revisions ship annually with new controls.
4. Scoring questionnaires manually — AI can auto-map responses to controls and flag inconsistencies in minutes.
How AI accelerates questionnaire review
Modern TPRM platforms like ShieldRisk AI apply large language models to questionnaire review: they extract answers from uploaded SOC 2 and ISO 27001 reports, pre-populate 40–60% of the questionnaire, flag answers that contradict published evidence, and produce a draft risk narrative for your reviewer. A full SIG Core review can be compressed from 20–30 hours of analyst time to 3–5 hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a newer version of SIG?
Can the vendor reuse a completed SIG or CAIQ?
What about industry-specific additions?
Should I ever skip the questionnaire?
Do vendors prefer one over the other?
Ready to modernize your vendor risk program?
ShieldRisk AI ships with the latest SIG, SIG Lite, CAIQ, and industry addenda pre-loaded — plus AI-assisted review that cuts questionnaire analysis time by 70%. Book a demo.