How small teams handle security questionnaires

Security questionnaires are especially difficult for small teams to handle efficiently. There's no compliance team to hand them off to, and the questions often assume enterprise-scale processes. Here's how to get through them without losing your week.

Last updated: December 18, 2025

Get your policies set up

Startups and small teams all start without any internal company policies. Normally the team is highly experienced, has a strong shared culture and good sense of the “right way” to do something. Creating policies in this situation often feels like overkill.

Creating a basic set of policies will help you in two ways:

It will create a clear, documented expectation of how your team should operate. Without internal policies, this becomes more difficult with each new hire and each new process. Examples include: when should MFA be used, how quickly should we respond to incidents, how often do we check our backups, how do we handle user accounts when employees leave?
It will be a consistent and honest source of answers for security questionnaires. One problem with reusing previous questionnaire answers is that often no ones knows why that is the answer or whether it is actually still how things are done.

A good set of polices to start with is:

Information Security Policy
Access Control Policy
Incident Response Plan
Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity Plan
Data Management Policy
Responsible AI Policy

The good news is you do not have to start from scratch! There is a great set of templates in StrongDM’s Comply tool on Github, policies are here.

You can also find policy generator tools that will generate the policies based on the nature of your business. ResponseHub’s free policy generator tool uses over 20 different attributes of your business to create best practice policy documents.

Set up a basic knowledge base

Keep a centralized knowledge base of previous questions and answers. The annoying thing is there are many different questionnaire standards (CAIQ, SIG, HECVAT, NIST) and often large orgs will create their own questionnaires.

Even still, a centralized knowledge base can help you to then delegate the questionnaire to someone else in the business. The Q&As can be quite text heavy, so using something like Notion is generally better than google sheets.

After each questionnaire make sure you allocate some time for reviewing the knowledge base, updating existing questions and adding new ones.

Pro-tip: make sure you remove any customer specific terminology or names from the Q&A text, the last thing you want to do is accidentally reference another customer in a security questionnaire!

Don’t be afraid to answer “no”

Do not be afraid to say you’re not doing something.

Security questionnaires are used to create a risk profile of your business that will be assessed relative to the criticality of the service you offer. So if you are handling business critical payments, you should have everything in order. An image generation tool for marketing will be deemed to be lower risk.

For medium or low risk products it will be fine to state that you do not have a sustainability policy or SLA backed RPOs & RTOs.

Just say no?

We have spoken with some startups who proudly say “we just say we don’t respond to security questionnaires”. This might work once or twice with organizations without a mature GRC posture but long term it shows a naivety which will cost deals. Mid-market and enterprise companies often have a regulatory or legal responsibility to carry out due diligence on all their vendors. They literally cannot make the purchase without completing this step.

Use ChatGPT with care

It’s tempting to paste the entire questionnaire into ChatGPT and let it generate responses. This can work as a starting point, but you need to verify every answer against your actual policies and practices.

Security questionnaires might feel like security theatre, but they have an important role in determining risk profile and allocating liability. If you have a data breach and your questionnaire claimed you had certain controls in place when you did not, you have just given them ammunition for a legal claim against you.

The risk is not just about what you say you do, it is about creating a documented record that can be used against you later. ChatGPT doesn’t know your actual setup. It will confidently tell a customer you have 24/7 security monitoring when you’re actually checking logs once a week.

Common Challenges (and solutions)

Small teams face a different set of challenges than larger organizations, who often have dedicated compliance teams.

Finding answers. The question might ask about “RBAC configuration” and your knowledge base might have something about “Roles and permissions based access”. No amount of cmd+f will help you find the answer!
Solution: add some extra columns or fields to your knowledge base entry for “question version 1”, “question version 2” etc or add a “key words” fields where you can add related terms.
Delegation. Security questionnaires are extremely hard to delegate because:
- Your engineers know the code but not your security posture, you don’t want to use their precious time anyway.
- Your ops lead or CSM is keen to help but will come back to you for 80% of the questions
- Small teams often need to make policy updates to meet a requirement of the customer
Solution: there is no quick win here. The best you can do is make sure your knowledge base and policies are well maintained and accessible to whoever is doing the questionnaires. If you’re thinking about delegating, it might be time to automate (see below)
Understanding terminology. Startup or small team CTOs are often experts at building product and building teams but compliance and security can be whole different world. So there are often terms or whole questions that don’t make sense.
Solution: this is one area where an LLM like ChatGPT can help explain what these mean. Be sure to include some of your business attributes in the prompt so it gives you an explainer that is relevant to your business.
Wasted time There is no getting around it, security questionnaires will suck up time. Through following the advice in this article you can better delegate and reduce that time.
Solution: If you are noticing that you or your team is losing significant time to security questionnaires, then it is probably time you start thinking about automation.

When to automate the process

Handling your first one or two questionnaires manually is not a terrible idea. It gets you familiar with the kind of questions and level of detail expected. Beyond that, security questionnaire automation is one area where you are guaranteed to get your time back.

To recap: get your policies documented, build a knowledge base, be honest in your answers, and know when manual effort stops making sense.

This is exactly why we built ResponseHub. It helps small teams quickly and accurately respond to security questionnaires:

An always up-to-date Knowledge Base with duplication detection and a review and approval workflow
1-click explainers for every question, tailored to your specific business and situation
AI-powered answers with confidence ratings and clear citations back to your policies and Knowledge Base
Usage-based pricing so you only pay for answers and don’t waste money on quieter months

Learn more about security questionnaire automation and how ResponseHub can help your team save time and close deals faster.