SIG Lite vs. Full SIG: Which One Will Your Prospect Send You?

You just closed a mid-market prospect and they send you a questionnaire: "Please complete the SIG Lite assessment."

Six months later, you're in conversations with an enterprise Fortune 500 company. Different questionnaire: "Please complete the Shared Assessments Full SIG."

Two different questionnaires. Two very different experiences. Same framework, totally different scope.

Understanding the difference between SIG Lite and Full SIG isn't just trivia—it's critical to preparing your security knowledge base correctly. If you only document answers for SIG Lite, you'll be scrambling when an enterprise prospect sends the full version. If you over-prepare for full SIG, you're wasting documentation effort on questions most of your buyers will never ask.

What Is the SIG Framework?

The "SIG" in both versions stands for Shared Assessments Information Security Assessment Questionnaire. Shared Assessments is an independent organization (backed by major auditing firms and trusted by the security community) that created a standardized framework for vendor security assessments.

The goal was simple: stop vendors from answering 50 different custom questionnaires from 50 different customers. Instead, most mid-market and enterprise companies now use either the Shared Assessments questionnaire or a variation of it.

Two main versions exist: SIG Lite and Full SIG. They're not competing frameworks—Full SIG is the complete standard, and SIG Lite is a streamlined subset designed for lower-risk vendors or smaller companies.

SIG Lite: The Streamlined Version

SIG Lite contains approximately 56 core security questions organized into 6 main domains:

• Information Security Program: Do you have a documented security program? Who owns it?
• Data Protection: How do you encrypt data? How is sensitive data classified and protected?
• Access Control: How do you manage user access? What authentication methods do you require?
• Threat and Vulnerability Management: Do you perform penetration testing? How do you patch vulnerabilities?
• Incident Management: What's your incident response plan? How quickly do you notify customers?
• Business Continuity: What's your disaster recovery plan? Where do you back up data?

The questionnaire is deliberately lightweight—most companies can complete it in 4-8 hours with input from their security and operations teams. The questions are straightforward and focused on the fundamentals of a mature security program.

Who uses SIG Lite? Smaller enterprises, mid-market companies, non-regulated industries, and procurement teams with limited security review bandwidth. You'll see SIG Lite from growth-stage SaaS companies evaluating vendors, mid-market financial services firms, and tech-forward manufacturing companies that haven't adopted full enterprise security review protocols yet.

Why companies use it: SIG Lite strikes a balance. It's thorough enough to give real insight into a vendor's security posture, but streamlined enough that procurement teams can move quickly without bogging down in dozens of detailed technical questions.

Full SIG: The Comprehensive Standard

Full SIG is the complete assessment framework developed by Shared Assessments. It contains 850+ questions organized across 19 detailed domains:

• Information Security Program Management
• Data Protection and Privacy
• Physical and Environmental Security
• Access Control and Authentication
• Cryptography
• Network and Communication Security
• Systems and Application Development
• Threat and Vulnerability Management
• Incident Response and Management
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
• Governance and Risk Management
• Subservice Organization Management
• Third-Party Management
• Monitoring, Alerting, and Logging
• Secure Development Lifecycle
• Mobile Security
• Cloud and Virtualization Security
• Compliance and Legal
• Supply Chain Security

Full SIG is designed for enterprise organizations with sophisticated security programs and regulatory requirements. Questions go deep: instead of "How do you encrypt data?" you get questions about specific encryption standards (AES-256), key management practices (HSMs, key rotation schedules), and compliance with standards like NIST or ISO 27001.

Completing Full SIG typically requires 40-80 hours of work, input from security, infrastructure, product, compliance, and legal teams, and multiple rounds of review and revision.

Who uses Full SIG? Large enterprises, regulated industries (financial services, healthcare, government), companies with significant compliance obligations, and Fortune 500 organizations. Any company with a mature security organization and the resources to review vendors thoroughly will send Full SIG.

Why companies use it: Full SIG provides comprehensive insight into how you handle security across every dimension of your business. For regulated companies, it helps satisfy compliance requirements and reduces their liability risk when contracting with vendors.

The Practical Difference: What This Means for You

Here's the key insight: the questions in SIG Lite are a subset of Full SIG. Every answer you provide in SIG Lite will also be in Full SIG, usually with more depth and follow-up questions.

This matters for how you build your knowledge base. If you're a mid-market SaaS company and 80% of your enterprise prospects send SIG Lite, you don't need to document full answers to all 850 Full SIG questions. Focus on the core 56 SIG Lite questions first, document them thoroughly, get them reviewed, and reuse them repeatedly.

But if you're starting to land larger enterprise deals, you need a different preparation strategy. You'll need deeper, more technical answers to the expanded Full SIG domains. Questions about specific cryptographic standards, detailed disaster recovery timelines, subservice organization risk management frameworks—these require different preparation.

Mapping Your Security Posture to SIG Domains

Once you decide to build a knowledge base for these assessments, the challenge is organization. How do you map your company's actual security practices to the SIG framework?

Start by conducting an internal audit. For each SIG domain, ask: "What do we actually do?" Document your encryption practices, access control mechanisms, incident response procedures, disaster recovery processes, and so on. This becomes your "inventory of facts" about your security program.

Then, review the actual SIG Lite questionnaire (you can request it from Shared Assessments). For each question, write an answer that references your actual practices. Don't exaggerate or overstate. If you don't do penetration testing annually because you're early-stage, say so—but explain what you do do for threat management. Buyers respect honest assessments backed by real practices more than fantasy security programs.

Finally, get these answers reviewed by your CISO or security lead for accuracy, your legal team for liability exposure, and your compliance officer if you're regulated. Once approved, these become your canonical answers that you reuse and adapt for different questionnaires.

The SIG Lite → Full SIG Journey

As your company grows and you start winning larger enterprise deals, expect the questionnaires to shift. Early customers will send SIG Lite. As you move upmarket, Full SIG becomes the standard. Some very large enterprises will even customize Full SIG, adding their own questions on top.

The transition isn't a cliff—it's a gradual shift in complexity. But it's important to recognize it happening so you can systematically expand your knowledge base instead of scrambling when you hit an enterprise deal and suddenly need comprehensive answers to 850 questions.