Due Diligence Questionnaire (DDQ)

If your company has ever been through a security review or if you’re preparing to work with enterprise customers, you’ve likely come across a Due Diligence Questionnaire (DDQ). 

What is a due diligence questionnaire?

A due diligence questionnaire, or DDQ, is a comprehensive document that organizations send to vendors (like your SaaS business) to assess the risks involved in doing business together.

These questionnaires help evaluate key aspects such as:

• Information security
• Data privacy
• Security protocols
• Compliance posture
• Business continuity

With the numbers of threats only increasing and becoming more advanced, partners want to ensure they’re not introducing unnecessary risk into their business operations. The meaning of a due diligence questionnaire (DDQ) extends beyond a simple checklist; it’s a comprehensive snapshot of your company’s trustworthiness and ability to safeguard sensitive data.

For SaaS companies especially, the DDQ is often a key part of vendor risk assessments during sales or procurement compliance processes. Filling it out thoroughly and efficiently can be the difference between securing a significant business transaction, landing a customer or stalling in the pipeline.

What are the key aspects of a due diligence questionnaire?

A well-designed DDQ touches on multiple areas of risk and operational maturity. While formats and frameworks can vary depending on the industry or customer requirements, most DDQs will include questions in the following categories:

Category	What It Covers
Information Security	Policies, encryption methods, access controls, and threat detection mechanisms
Security Compliance	Adherence to key security compliance and data privacy frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, or GDPR
Data Privacy	How personal data is collected, stored, processed, and protected
Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery	Incident response plans, backups, and resilience strategies
Infrastructure & Hosting	Cloud service providers, physical security, and redundancy measures
Access Management	MFA implementation, least privilege access, and onboarding/offboarding
Third-Party Risk	How you vet and manage your own vendors and service providers

You might also encounter questions about company financials, legal policies, employee training, and insurance coverage. Larger organizations often have their own templates or tools, such as the SIG (Standardized Information Gathering) questionnaire or CAIQ (Consensus Assessments Initiative Questionnaire).

Why is a due diligence questionnaire important?

As a growing SaaS company, you’re constantly looking for ways to build trust with your customers, partners, and stakeholders. Completing a due diligence questionnaire is a crucial part of proving your commitment to security and compliance. Here’s why the DDQ process matters:

• Accelerates sales cycles: Many enterprise customers require a completed DDQ before signing a deal. The faster and more confidently you respond, the smoother the sales process.
  
• Builds trust with stakeholders: A thorough DDQ response signals that your company operates responsibly and transparently.
  
• Reinforces your compliance strategy: DDQs often overlap with requirements from SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and other frameworks, so it’s a powerful way to validate and showcase your GRC efforts.
  
• Encourages internal alignment: Answering DDQs forces cross-functional collaboration between security, legal, IT, and engineering teams.
  
• Reduces the risk of red flags: Incomplete or inconsistent responses can make your company seem unprepared and risky to work with.

If you’re getting the same questions repeatedly, that’s not a coincidence, but a pattern. Having a standardized and up-to-date DDQ response ready to go is essential as your company scales.

Streamline the DDQ process with compliance automation software

Manually completing a DDQ can be time-consuming, repetitive, and prone to delays. It often involves gathering input from multiple departments, validating policy documentation, and tracking down the latest versions of audit reports.

Compliance automation platforms like Scytale enable SaaS companies to automate, centralize, and streamline their security and compliance workflows, making the DDQ process significantly faster, more accurate, and easier to manage. Scytale simplifies and strengthens your approach to Due Diligence Questionnaires by enabling you to:

• Maintain a real-time security profile: Keep your security and compliance posture continuously updated and audit-ready, making it easy to repurpose accurate, verified information for any DDQ request.
  
• Leverage industry-aligned frameworks: Utilize pre-mapped standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and HIPAA to ensure your responses reflect customer expectations and compliance requirements.
  
• Auto-generate DDQ-ready documentation: Quickly produce up-to-date policies, procedures, and control evidence, minimizing manual effort and ensuring consistency across every response.
  
• Reuse and repurpose previous responses: Avoid unnecessary effort and stalling by storing and reusing vetted answers across multiple questionnaires, reducing errors and accelerating turnaround time.
  
• Streamline collaboration across teams: Assign questions, track progress, and coordinate input from legal, security, and engineering. An all-in-one centralized platform will exponentially boost cross-functional efficiency.

More often than not, many customers will ask you to complete a DDQ. By operationalizing your DDQ process, you can confidently prove your security posture to those who matter most, with clarity and speed.