Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire (CAIQ)

The CAIQ exists to kill duplicate effort. Rather than every buyer drafting their own cloud-security questions, the Cloud Security Alliance publishes one set, keyed to the control catalog in its Cloud Controls Matrix, and a provider answers it once. The completed document is designed to travel: vendors publish theirs through the alliance’s public registry or on a trust center, turning a per-deal chore into a reusable, inspectable artifact.

The two big standardized questionnaires are not interchangeable, and the difference is scope. The CAIQ is cloud-specific and comparatively compact — assertion-style questions about a cloud service’s controls, built so a buyer can evaluate providers quickly. The Standardized Information Gathering (SIG) questionnaire, maintained by Shared Assessments, is a general-purpose third-party-risk instrument: broader domains, scalable depth, aimed at vendors of every kind rather than cloud platforms alone. A bank’s vendor-risk office tends to send a SIG; a cloud-native buyer will often accept your published CAIQ and move on.

A fixed question set rewards preparation. Build the answer library once, keep it synchronized with your certifications and your actual stack, and every future request becomes an export rather than a week-long research project. Agency maintains that library and completes the CAIQ — along with the bespoke security questionnaires buyers write themselves — through our questionnaire service.