Why Everyone Is Automating Security Questionnaires (And You Should Too)?
Security questionnaires are no longer optional. If you’re in SaaS, fintech, BFSI, or any regulated industry, you’ve likely filled out one—or dozens—of them. They’re a standard part of due diligence, compliance audits, and enterprise procurement processes. But as necessary as they are, there’s one universal truth about security questionnaires: they’re painful when handled manually.
Filling out a security questionnaire by hand (or spreadsheet) isn’t just a time suck—it’s a risk. From inconsistent answers and version control nightmares to the constant back-and-forth between internal teams, the manual approach is slow, repetitive, and increasingly unsustainable as your business scales.
Let’s break down why companies are ditching spreadsheets and switching to automation—and why you should too.
Top Challenges of Responding Manually to Security Questionnaires
Security questionnaires ask hundreds of questions—sometimes thousands—about your security posture, compliance policies, infrastructure, and risk management practices. They often look like simple checklists, but behind each “yes” or “no” lies documentation, context, and sometimes legal exposure.
And when you’re manually responding to these questionnaires, here’s what you’re really dealing with:
1. Repetitive Data Entry Drains Time
If you’ve answered one security questionnaire, you’ve answered them all—or so it feels. Most questionnaires ask variations of the same 200–300 questions. Yet, companies end up rewriting responses each time because there’s no organized, searchable database of past answers.
The result? A game of copy-paste across different formats, PDFs, Excel sheets, and portals. You waste hours—or even weeks—on something that should take minutes.
2. Error-Prone Responses Lead to Audit Risks
When multiple team members work on the same questionnaire across different time zones or tools, inconsistencies are bound to happen. One version of an answer lives in someone’s inbox, another on a SharePoint folder last updated six months ago.
These small inconsistencies can snowball into bigger issues:
- Mismatched answers across questionnaires
- Outdated compliance documents
- Incomplete evidence submissions
These errors don’t just slow you down—they increase your audit risk and can even result in failing due diligence checks.
3. Slows Down Sales & Vendor Onboarding
Sales teams hate waiting, and so do enterprise buyers. But when filling out a security questionnaire takes two to four weeks—or longer—it delays procurement, pushes back onboarding, and can jeopardize deals altogether.
Many fast-growing SaaS companies find themselves stuck in limbo: their product is ready, the customer is interested, but the deal can’t move forward until someone manually completes a 300-question Excel sheet.
Manual questionnaires don’t just frustrate your internal team—they frustrate your prospects.
4. No Single Source of Truth for Answers
When security and compliance teams don’t have a centralized knowledge base for questionnaire responses, they rely on tribal knowledge. “Check with IT.” “Ask Legal.” “I think we answered this before, let me dig it up.”
This kind of scattered knowledge leads to delays, miscommunication, and duplicative work. It also makes onboarding new team members harder since there’s no systematized way to manage past responses.
5. Frequent Updates to Standards = Constant Rewriting
Security and compliance standards evolve constantly. SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, HIPAA—all of them go through updates, and your policies need to reflect those changes.
That means your security questionnaire answers must also be regularly updated. When you’re managing this manually, it feels like you’re rewriting your entire response set every quarter just to stay current.
6. Scaling Becomes Impossible Without Automation
The biggest problem with manual security questionnaires? They don’t scale.
What worked when you were handling five questionnaires a year breaks down when you’re fielding five per month—or five per week. Growth brings more deals, more vendors, more compliance reviews. Without automation, your team becomes the bottleneck.
The Fix: AI-Powered Automation
The solution to this growing problem is surprisingly simple: automation.
AI-powered security questionnaire platforms like Narad use your historical responses, compliance documents, and context to auto-fill future questionnaires with a high degree of accuracy. Instead of starting from scratch every time, you start from done.
Here’s what automation changes:
- It reduces response time from weeks to hours—or even minutes.
- It maintains consistency and accuracy across responses.
- It creates a searchable knowledge base for reuse.
- It supports updates in real-time as standards evolve.
In short, automation turns your security questionnaire process from a blocker into a competitive advantage.
Narad is built specifically to help high-growth companies handle security questionnaires at scale. Whether you’re filling out SOC 2, ISO 27001, or a custom Excel sheet from a Fortune 500 client, Narad helps you respond faster, with fewer errors, and complete confidence.
And the proof is in the numbers: Companies using Narad have seen up to 90% faster turnaround times for security reviews, dramatically speeding up vendor onboarding and sales cycles.
Conclusion
If you’re still handling security questionnaires manually, you’re not just wasting time—you’re risking deals, reputation, and compliance.
The truth is, security questionnaires aren’t going anywhere. In fact, as regulations tighten and buyers become more risk-aware, they’re only becoming more detailed and frequent.
The good news? You don’t have to choose between security and speed. With tools like Narad, you can handle questionnaires at scale—without burning out your compliance team or slowing down your business.
Everyone is automating security questionnaires—and now, so can you.