Security Questions That Enterprise Buyers Actually Ask

Picture this: your sales team just landed a meeting with a Fortune 500 company. The demo goes perfectly, the pricing aligns, and then comes the moment that can make or break the deal—the security review. Suddenly, your inbox fills with hundreds of detailed questions about encryption standards, incident response procedures, and compliance certifications. This scenario plays out thousands of times each day across the B2B SaaS world, where security has become the gatekeeper to enterprise deals.

The security questionnaire has evolved from a simple checkbox exercise into a comprehensive examination that can span hundreds of questions and take weeks to complete, often following standardized security questionnaires used across the industry.

For enterprise buyers, these reviews are non-negotiable. They need concrete proof that your company can protect their data before they’ll even consider signing a contract. We’ll walk through the most common security questions enterprise buyers ask, why they ask them, and how you can prepare your organization to handle these reviews efficiently.

What Security Questions Do Enterprise Buyers Actually Ask?

When an enterprise buyer evaluates your software, they ask detailed security questions to understand exactly how you protect their data. These aren’t the simple "What was your first pet’s name?" questions used for password recovery. They are deep, technical inquiries into your security controls, operational policies, and governance procedures.

At its core, an enterprise security questionnaire is a formal risk assessment. The buyer is trying to build a comprehensive picture of your security posture to ensure you won’t introduce a new vulnerability into their environment. They ask these questions to verify your claims and gather the evidence they need to justify the purchase to their own leadership.

We’ve seen over a million of these questions on the SafeBase platform. They almost always fall into a few key categories: how you govern your program, the technical controls you have in place, how you manage data, and how you respond when things go wrong. Understanding these categories is the first step to preparing for them effectively.

Why Enterprise Buyers Ask Tough Security Questions

The days of a simple handshake and a promise to keep data safe are long gone. High-profile supply chain attacks have shown that a vulnerability in one of your vendors can quickly become a devastating breach for your own company, with data breaches now costing an average of $4.45 million globally, highlighting the evolving nature of cybersecurity threats organizations face today. This reality has turned the vendor security review into a critical, non-negotiable step in the buying process.

Your customer’s security team is on the hook. They have to justify the risk of every new vendor to their CISO, their legal department, and often the executive board. Tough questions are how they perform their due diligence and gain the confidence needed to sign off on your product.

For them, a thorough security review is essential for several reasons:

• Risk Mitigation: They need to prevent a security incident at your company from cascading into their own systems. Your security posture is now part of their security posture.
• Compliance Adherence: They must ensure that all their vendors meet the strict data protection requirements of regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. A failure on your part could lead to massive fines for them.
• Internal Justification: They need to build a case file with concrete evidence proving that your tool is safe to adopt. This file is their defense if something goes wrong later.

Common SOC 2 Security Questions from Enterprise Buyers

For most B2B SaaS companies selling in North America, the SOC 2 report is the cornerstone of their security program. SOC 2 is an auditing procedure that ensures a company can securely manage customer data. Because it’s so widely adopted, many security questionnaires are built around its core principles, known as the Trust Services Criteria.

Here are some of the most common security question examples you can expect related to SOC 2 controls.

Access Control and Authentication

Buyers need absolute certainty that only authorized individuals can access their data. These questions are designed to verify your identity and access management (IAM) controls, which are the policies and technologies you use to manage who has access to what.

They will want to know how you enforce the principle of least privilege, meaning users only have access to the information and resources necessary for their job.

• Do you enforce multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all administrative access to production systems?
• What are your password policy requirements for complexity, history, and rotation?
• How do you manage and secure credentials for service accounts and other non-human identities?

Data Encryption and Protection

Understanding the role of encryption in information security is fundamental for protecting the confidentiality and integrity of data. Buyers will ask for specific details on how you encrypt data both when it’s being stored on your servers (at rest) and when it’s moving across networks (in transit).

They are looking for proof that even if an attacker gained access to your physical infrastructure, the data itself would remain unreadable and useless.

• What encryption standards and algorithms (e.g., AES-256) do you use for customer data at rest and in transit?
• Can you describe your encryption key management process, including who has access to keys and how they are stored?
• Where is our data physically stored, and do you offer the ability to specify a geographic region for data residency?

Incident Response and Monitoring

Even with the strongest defenses, security incidents can still happen. Buyers need to be confident that you have a well-defined plan to detect, respond to, and communicate about security events in a timely and effective manner.

Your ability to respond quickly can be the difference between a minor issue and a major breach, which is why establishing effective information security incident response procedures is critical. Buyers will ask about your incident response plan to understand your process, your team’s readiness, and your commitment to transparency.

A mature incident response program typically includes these key phases, which buyers will ask about:

• Preparation: What training and tools does your team have in place before an incident occurs?
• Detection & Analysis: How do you monitor your systems for suspicious activity and determine if an event is a real security incident?
• Containment, Eradication, & Recovery: What are your procedures for stopping an attack, removing the threat, and restoring normal operations?
• Post-Incident Activity: How do you conduct a root cause analysis to learn from the incident and improve your defenses?

ISO 27001 Security Questions You’ll Encounter

While SOC 2 is dominant in North America, ISO 27001 is the world’s best-known standard for an Information Security Management System (ISMS). An ISMS is a documented system that describes how your company manages security. If you work with international or large enterprise customers, you will almost certainly face questions based on the ISO 27001 framework.

These questions tend to focus more on the overall management, governance, and continual improvement of your security program, rather than just the technical controls themselves.

Information Security Policies

Buyers want to see that your security program is guided by formal, well-documented policies that have been approved by management. This proves that your security culture is intentional and not just a collection of informal practices.

These policies are the foundation of your ISMS and demonstrate a top-down commitment to security.

• How often are your information security policies reviewed, updated, and approved by senior management?
• What mandatory security awareness training do all employees and contractors receive upon hiring and on an ongoing basis?
• Can you provide a copy of your master information security policy document?

Risk Management Process

A mature security program is driven by risk. Buyers will ask about your process for identifying, assessing, and mitigating security risks to ensure you are proactively managing threats instead of just reacting to them.

They need to know that you have a structured way to make decisions about which security controls to implement based on the specific threats your organization faces, supported by a strong security culture throughout your organization.

Your risk management process should include these core activities:

• Risk Identification: How do you find potential security risks across your organization?
• Risk Analysis: How do you determine the likelihood and potential impact of each identified risk?
• Risk Evaluation: How do you compare risks and decide which ones need to be addressed first?
• Risk Treatment: What actions do you take to mitigate, transfer, accept, or avoid each risk?

Business Continuity Planning

Your service is often a critical part of your customer’s own business operations. They need absolute assurance that it will remain available even in the face of a major disruption, like a natural disaster or a widespread system failure.

Your business continuity and disaster recovery plans show that you have thought through worst-case scenarios and have a plan to keep your service running.

• Can you provide a summary of your business continuity and disaster recovery plans?
• What are your stated Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) commitments?
• How frequently do you test your data backups and conduct full disaster recovery exercises?

Data Protection and Privacy Questions

Beyond traditional security controls, privacy has become a top concern for enterprise buyers. Driven by powerful regulations like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California, which can levy harsh fines reaching into the tens of millions of euros, buyers need to know that you handle personal data responsibly and in full compliance with the law.

These questions focus on your data governance practices and your ability to protect the privacy rights of individuals, addressing common privacy FAQs for security teams. A failure to meet these standards can result in enormous fines and reputational damage for both you and your customer.

GDPR and Privacy Compliance

For any company that does business in Europe or handles the data of EU citizens, demonstrating GDPR compliance is non-negotiable. Buyers will ask specific questions to verify that you can meet these strict obligations.

They need to know that you can support the rights that GDPR grants to individuals over their personal data.

Some of the key data subject rights you’ll be asked about include:

• The Right to Access: Can an individual get a copy of all the personal data you hold on them?
• The Right to Rectification: Can an individual correct inaccurate information you have about them?
• The Right to Erasure: Can an individual request that you delete their personal data (also known as the "right to be forgotten")?
• The Right to Data Portability: Can an individual receive their data in a machine-readable format to move it to another service?

Data Handling and Retention

Buyers want to ensure their data is handled appropriately throughout its entire lifecycle, from the moment you collect it to the moment you securely destroy it. This includes making sure you don’t keep data for longer than is legally or contractually necessary.

A clear data handling policy shows that you are a responsible steward of your customers’ information.

• Do you maintain a data classification policy, and how do you ensure sensitive data is identified and protected accordingly?
• What are your data retention policies for different types of customer data?
• What are your procedures for the secure disposal of data once the retention period has expired?

How to Prepare for Enterprise Security Reviews

Answering hundreds of security questions reactively is a massive drain on your security and GRC teams, making effective collaboration between sales and security teams essential for efficiency. This manual, back-and-forth process slows down sales cycles, creates a poor buying experience, and pulls your most strategic people away from high-impact work, making it crucial for teams to understand how security leaders can prove ROI through more efficient processes. The key is to shift from a reactive posture to a proactive one.

You can get ahead of these reviews by centralizing your security knowledge and making it easily accessible to both your internal teams and your customers. This approach not only saves countless hours but also builds deep digital trust through transparency. A well-organized SafeBase Trust Center allows you to proactively share your security documentation, compliance certifications, and audit reports, empowering buyers to self-serve the information they need and dramatically reducing the number of inbound questionnaires you receive.

Frequently Asked Questions About Enterprise Security Reviews

Here are answers to some common follow-up questions about navigating the enterprise security review process.

What security certifications do enterprise buyers expect?

For most B2B SaaS companies, a SOC 2 Type II report is the baseline expectation. ISO 27001 is often required for doing business globally, while industry-specific certifications like HIPAA for healthcare are also common.

How long do enterprise security reviews typically take?

A manual review process handled through email and spreadsheets can easily take two to four weeks to complete. By using a proactive approach with a Trust Center, you can reduce this turnaround time to just a few days or even hours.

What documentation should we prepare for security questionnaires?

You should have your most recent security documentation ready to share, including your SOC 2 report, a summary of your latest penetration test results, your core information security policies, and a network architecture diagram.

Do security requirements differ by company size?

Yes, security requirements often scale with the size of the customer. Fortune 500 companies typically have more extensive and rigorous security questionnaires than mid-market or startup customers, who may focus more on core certifications.

How can we speed up the security review process?

The most effective way to accelerate security reviews is to implement a Trust Center with security questionnaire automation for self-service access to security documents. You can further streamline the process by using AI Questionnaire Assistance to automate responses to inbound security questionnaires.