Scrutineer · Vendor risk

Security questionnaire automation software that automates every security questionnaire response, inbound and vendor

Security questionnaires are a tax paid in both directions: your team drowns answering the ones customers send, and your risk team drowns reading the ones vendors return. Security questionnaire automation should fix both. Scrutineer auto-answers inbound questionnaires from your own controls and evidence, and evaluates the outbound ones you send to vendors.

For inbound questionnaires, Scrutineer drafts answers grounded in your live control evidence, so responses are accurate, consistent and fast to approve. For outbound vendor questionnaires, it scores the responses against a standard and turns them into a risk score with evidence. The same scrutiny engine works on both sides, so questionnaires stop being a bottleneck and start producing real signal.

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Control-mapped findings · linked evidence · you decide what to remediate

The Scrutiny Desk

Illustrative sample · not an audit attestation

SOC 2 ISO 27001 HIPAA GDPR PCI DSS

Controls in evidence-linked report out

AI scrutinizes you decide

Why it works

What you get with questionnaire automation

Inbound answered from evidence

Scrutineer drafts answers to customer security questionnaires straight from your live control evidence, so responses are accurate and consistent, and approval is quick.

Outbound scored automatically

Vendor responses are evaluated against a standard and turned into a risk score, so your team reads a verdict instead of 200 raw answers.

One source of truth

Both directions draw on the same control library, so answers you give and assessments you make stay consistent and current.

What it handles

Controls in, an evidence-linked report out

Point Scrutineer at a framework or a vendor and it maps every control, pulls the evidence it can find, flags the gaps and scores the risk, returning a report with linked evidence and a prioritized remediation list. Scrutineer is decision support for readiness, an accredited auditor still issues the attestation.

Auto-drafts answers to inbound questionnaires
Grounds every answer in live control evidence
Keeps responses consistent across questionnaires
Scores outbound vendor questionnaire responses
Turns vendor answers into a risk score
Maintains one control library for both directions

QUESTIONNAIRE AUTOMATION readiness_report

READINESS · 82%

ACCESS CONTROL 91

evidence · MFA enforced and access reviews evidenced.

CHANGE MGMT 78

evidence · Mostly covered; one approval log left untested.

VENDOR RISK 64

evidence · Two subprocessors missing a current review.

ENCRYPTION 86

evidence · Data encrypted in transit and at rest, evidenced.

Example report layout, not customer data

Why Scrutineer

One platform that maps controls and scores risk

Not a static questionnaire, not a pass-fail black box, and not a spreadsheet you maintain by hand. Live control mapping across SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR and PCI, automatic evidence and a prioritized gap list, returned as a report you can act on. The AI scrutinizes, you decide.

Mapped to real controls

Every framework is broken down into the controls it actually requires, each scored on a red to amber to green scale, so readiness stays transparent and consistent.

Evidence behind every finding

Each control links to the exact evidence that satisfies it, the policy, the config, the log line, so the finding is auditable and your readiness is defensible.

A prioritized gap list

Open gaps roll up into a ranked remediation list, so the highest-risk findings sit at the top and your team fixes what matters before the audit begins.

Questionnaire reference

The standard security questionnaires, and who sends which

Most inbound questions arrive on one of a handful of recognized formats, plus a long tail of bespoke spreadsheets. Knowing which is which tells you how much of your answer library will be reusable.

Questionnaire	Who publishes it	When you see it
SIG and SIG Lite	Shared Assessments	Financial services, insurance and large enterprises. Updated annually, so answers need a review cycle rather than a one-time fill
CAIQ	Cloud Security Alliance	Cloud and SaaS procurement. Maps to the Cloud Controls Matrix, and a completed CAIQ can be published in the CSA STAR registry so buyers self-serve
HECVAT	EDUCAUSE	Selling to colleges and universities. A full and a lite version exist, and higher-ed buyers often require it specifically
VSA	Vendor Security Alliance	Technology companies assessing each other, with a core and a full version
Bespoke spreadsheets	The buying company itself	Everywhere, and usually the most expensive to answer because nothing about the format is reusable without a mapped control library behind it

Question counts change with each annual release, so confirm the current version with the publisher before committing to a response timeline.

Good questions

Questions about questionnaire automation

Scrutineer maps questions to your live controls and evidence and drafts grounded answers, so your team reviews and approves rather than writing from scratch. Because answers come from the same control library, they stay accurate and consistent across every questionnaire.

Yes. Outbound vendor responses are evaluated against a standard and rolled into an evidence-backed risk score, so questionnaire fatigue turns into actual signal you can act on, and your team makes the final call.

You build a control library with the evidence behind each control, then match incoming questions to that library so answers are drafted rather than written. A reviewer approves or corrects each one, and the correction feeds back into the library. The gain compounds: every questionnaire you answer makes the next one faster, because the same questions keep coming back in different wording.

Manually, a standard SIG Lite or CAIQ runs a few hours and a full enterprise questionnaire can consume several days across security, legal and engineering. With answers drafted from an existing evidence-backed control library, most teams cut that to a review pass measured in minutes to an hour, because the work shifts from writing to approving.

The common industry standards, including SIG and SIG Lite, the Cloud Security Alliance CAIQ, VSA and the many bespoke spreadsheets enterprise procurement teams send. Because answers map to your controls rather than to one template, a new format is a mapping problem rather than a rewrite.

Only when they are grounded in real evidence and reviewed by a human before they go out. An answer drafted from a live control with the artifact attached is verifiable. An answer generated from a language model with no evidence behind it is a liability, because you are making a written security representation to a customer. Keep the approval step.

Security questionnaire software stores your security answers as a reusable, evidence-backed control library and matches incoming questions against it, so responses are drafted and approved instead of written from scratch. Good tools work in both directions: answering the questionnaires customers send you, and scoring the ones you send your vendors.

It should send the questionnaire, chase the vendor for a response, score the answers against a consistent standard, and flag the gaps that matter rather than handing you 200 raw rows to read. The score needs evidence behind it and it needs to keep updating, because a vendor assessed once at onboarding tells you nothing about their posture eighteen months later.

You build an answer library grounded in your actual controls and evidence, then let software match each incoming question to the right answer and draft a response for a human to approve. The step most teams skip is grounding: an answer library fed by old questionnaires drifts out of date quietly, while one fed by live control evidence stays accurate because it changes when your systems do.

Three things. Role separation, so a sales engineer can request an answer without being able to approve a security claim. Audit history on every answer, showing who changed what and when, because an enterprise legal team will eventually ask what you told a customer eighteen months ago. And scale in the review queue: at enterprise volume the bottleneck stops being drafting and becomes the small number of people qualified to approve, so the tool has to route by topic rather than dumping everything on one reviewer.

They take the questionnaire off the critical path of the deal. The usual pattern is that a security review lands mid-cycle, the account executive forwards it to whoever answered the last one, and the deal stalls for two weeks waiting on someone whose actual job is elsewhere. With answers drafted from approved evidence, sales can turn a standard questionnaire around in hours and escalate only the genuinely new questions, which is where the time saved converts into closed revenue rather than just less admin.

Three different things get sold under that label and they solve different problems. Browser extensions autofill a portal form from a saved answer library, which is fast but only works on portals the extension supports. Answer generation tools draft responses from your existing documentation and past questionnaires, which is where most of the time saving actually is. Full agents attempt the whole questionnaire and route only low-confidence items to a human. Judge any of them on answer provenance rather than on speed: an answer you cannot trace back to a control or a document is one your security lead has to re-verify anyway.

They help most when your questionnaires arrive through a small number of portals you see repeatedly, because an extension only supports the interfaces it was built for. If your inbound mix is mostly spreadsheets and one-off customer templates, an extension covers little of the work and an answer library that exports to any format covers more. The other consideration is where your answer content lives: an extension that stores answers separately from your control evidence quietly creates a second source of truth that drifts.

The right one depends on which direction hurts. If inbound customer questionnaires are the bottleneck, prioritize answer accuracy and how the tool grounds responses in real evidence. If you are the one assessing vendors, prioritize scoring and continuous monitoring. Scrutineer covers both from one control library, which matters when the answers you give and the assessments you make have to stay consistent.

Read every compliance and risk question

Keep reading

Guides that go deeper on questionnaires and vendor risk

Automating security questionnaires

How SIG, CAIQ and bespoke questionnaires get answered from an evidence-backed control library instead of from scratch.

Read the guide

The questionnaire automation platforms compared

Response tools versus assessment tools, what each is genuinely good at, and the answer-library trap that ships stale claims to customers.

Read the guide

The vendor risk management process

Intake and tiering, due diligence, scoring third-party risk, continuous monitoring and remediation, step by step.

Read the guide

What SOC 2 compliance actually is

The Trust Services Criteria behind most of the questions customers send you, and the evidence auditors want.

Read the guide

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See every use case See pricing Back to Scrutineer

Stop guessing about readiness. Scrutinize on real evidence.

Point Scrutineer at a framework or a vendor and it maps every control, gathers evidence and scores the risk, returning an evidence-linked report and a prioritized gap list. The AI scrutinizes, you decide.

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SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR & PCI · evidence-linked controls · readiness, not certification