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Privacy & Compliance

Security Audit & Compliance Readiness Assessment

Evaluates team-level preparedness for SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and other compliance audits. Use this to identify control gaps, evidence retrieval challenges, and resource priorities before your next audit cycle.

Sample questions

A preview of what’s in the template. Every question is editable before you launch.

26 questions · ~11 min
Q01
Message

Welcome to the Security Audit & Compliance Readiness Assessment. This survey asks about your team's or function's audit preparedness over the past 12 months. Your participation is voluntary, and you may stop at any time. There are no right or wrong answers—we value your honest perspective. All responses will be kept confidential and reported only in aggregate to identify readiness gaps and prioritize pre-audit actions. The survey takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. If you are unsure about a question, select 'Not sure' or skip it.

Q02
Multiple Choice

Which of the following attestations or audits are expected to apply to your area in the next 12 months? Select all that apply.

  • SOC 2
  • ISO 27001
  • ISO 27701
  • PCI DSS
  • HIPAA
  • FedRAMP
  • SOX ITGC
  • GDPR
  • CCPA/CPRA
  • Other
  • Not sure
Q03
Dropdown

Which primary control framework does your area currently align to?

  • ISO 27001 Annex A
  • NIST SP 800-53
  • NIST CSF
  • COBIT
  • SOC Trust Services Criteria
  • Custom/internal framework
  • None
  • Not sure
Q04
Opinion Scale

How confident are you that your team could retrieve all required audit evidence within 5 business days?

Scale: 17
Min:Not at all confidentMax:Extremely confident
Q05
Dropdown

Approximately how many audit or compliance findings are currently open for your area?

  • 0
  • 1–5
  • 6–10
  • 11–20
  • 21–50
  • More than 50
  • Not sure
Q06
AI Interview

We'd like to explore your team's audit readiness challenges in a bit more depth. An AI moderator will ask you 1–2 follow-up questions based on the topics covered in this survey.

Q07
Long Text

What support or enablement would help your team most before the next audit?

Q08
Dropdown

Which function best describes your role?

  • Engineering/Development
  • IT/Operations
  • Security/GRC
  • Product/Program Management
  • Data/Analytics
  • Finance/Legal
  • HR/People
  • Other
Q09
Message

Thank you for completing this assessment. Your responses will help us identify readiness gaps and prioritize actions before the next audit cycle. If you have any questions, please reach out to your compliance team.

Q10
Opinion Scale

How clearly is the audit scope defined for your team or function?

Scale: 17
Min:Not at all definedMax:Very clearly defined
Q11
Dropdown

How would you rate the current implementation status of access management controls in your area?

  • Fully implemented and tested
  • Implemented but not regularly tested
  • Partially implemented
  • Planned but not yet implemented
  • Not applicable
  • Not sure
Q12
Multiple Choice

Where is most audit evidence or source records stored today? Select all that apply.

  • Ticketing system (e.g., Jira, ServiceNow)
  • GRC platform
  • Shared drives (e.g., SharePoint, Google Drive)
  • Version control (e.g., Git)
  • SIEM/log platform
  • HRIS
  • Asset inventory/CMDB
  • Email threads
  • Other
Q13
Ranking

Rank the following blockers to audit readiness from biggest (top) to smallest (bottom).

  1. Insufficient staffing
  2. Unclear requirements
  3. Evidence scattered across tools
  4. Competing priorities
  5. Control gaps or coverage issues
  6. Limited tooling or automation
Drag to rank
Q14
Long Text

Based on your responses in this survey, is there any additional context or feedback you would like to share about your team's audit readiness?

Q15
Dropdown

Approximately how many employees are in your organization?

  • Fewer than 100
  • 100–499
  • 500–999
  • 1,000–4,999
  • 5,000–9,999
  • 10,000 or more
  • Not sure
Q16
Dropdown

Who is the primary owner of audit responses for your team or function?

  • Team lead/manager
  • Dedicated compliance/PM
  • Technical SME
  • Shared ownership (no single owner)
  • No designated owner
  • Not sure
Q17
Dropdown

How would you rate the current implementation status of change management controls in your area?

  • Fully implemented and tested
  • Implemented but not regularly tested
  • Partially implemented
  • Planned but not yet implemented
  • Not applicable
  • Not sure
Q18
Multiple Choice

On average, how long does it take your team to produce evidence once an auditor requests it?

  • Same day
  • 1–2 business days
  • 3–5 business days
  • 6–10 business days
  • More than 10 business days
  • Not sure
Q19
Dropdown

When is your next internal readiness review or dry run planned?

  • Within the next month
  • 1–3 months from now
  • 3–6 months from now
  • 6–12 months from now
  • No review planned
  • Not sure
Q20
Dropdown

Approximately how many people are in your team or function?

  • 1–5
  • 6–10
  • 11–25
  • 26–50
  • 51–100
  • Over 100
  • Not sure
Q21
Dropdown

How would you rate the current implementation status of incident response controls in your area?

  • Fully implemented and tested
  • Implemented but not regularly tested
  • Partially implemented
  • Planned but not yet implemented
  • Not applicable
  • Not sure
Q22
Long Text

Briefly describe the most significant audit risk currently facing your area.

Q23
Dropdown

Where are you primarily located?

  • Americas
  • EMEA
  • APAC
  • Other
  • Prefer not to say
Q24
Opinion Scale

To what extent is control testing automated in your area?

Scale: 17
Min:Not at all automatedMax:Fully automated
Q25
Multiple Choice

When were your key policies and standards last reviewed and approved?

  • Within 6 months
  • 6–12 months ago
  • 12–24 months ago
  • Over 24 months ago
  • Not applicable
  • Not sure
Q26
Dropdown

Approximately what percentage of your team completed required security or compliance training in the last 12 months?

  • 0% (none)
  • 1–25%
  • 26–50%
  • 51–75%
  • 76–99%
  • 100% (all)
  • Not sure

What’s included

  • AI follow-ups

    Adaptive probes on open-ended answers that pull out detail a static form would miss.

  • Attention checks

    Built-in safeguards against rushed answers and low-quality respondents.

  • AI-drafted copy

    Wording, ordering, and branching written by the AI — tuned to your research goal.

  • Auto report

    Themes, quotes, and a plain-English summary write themselves once responses come in.

How it compares

We reviewed the closest templates from other survey tools. Here’s what they do well — and where this template goes further.

Why this template

  • Includes an adaptive AI follow-up interview that probes deeper into the single most significant audit risk a respondent identifies, rather than stopping at a static list
  • Uses dropdown and opinion-scale questions to benchmark control maturity (access management, change management, incident response) alongside framework alignment (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA)
  • Captures practical readiness signals — evidence storage location, time-to-produce-evidence, open findings count, and a ranked list of blockers — to surface prioritization data, not just yes/no compliance checkboxes
  • Closes with open-text questions on support needs and additional context, plus an auto-generated report, so audit and security teams get synthesized findings instead of raw spreadsheet exports

SurveySparrow

Compliance Risk Assessment Questionnaire

This is a general-purpose compliance risk assessment template covering broad organizational risk areas rather than audit-cycle-specific readiness (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA). It's a fielding-ready static questionnaire built on SurveySparrow's conversational form format, but it isn't tailored to evidence retrieval or control-maturity scoring. Useful as a general risk-screening tool rather than an audit-prep diagnostic.

What it does well

  • Conversational, chat-style survey format that may feel more approachable than a traditional form
  • Part of a broader template library so it can be customized within SurveySparrow's editor
  • Likely supports standard branching logic and multiple question types

Where it falls short

  • No adaptive AI interviewing — follow-up questions, if any, are pre-scripted rather than generated from the respondent's actual answer
  • No visible mechanism for scoring response quality or evidence-readiness at the individual-response level
  • Not specifically structured around named frameworks (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA) or audit-cycle mechanics like evidence retrieval time

QuestionPro

Vendor Security and Assessment Sample Questionnaire Template

This template is designed for assessing third-party vendor security posture rather than an organization's own internal audit readiness across teams. It's a static, fielding-ready questionnaire with security-domain question coverage, but it targets vendor risk management use cases rather than internal control-maturity or evidence-retrieval readiness. Relevant as a security-questionnaire comparator, though the audience and use case differ from internal audit prep.

What it does well

  • Purpose-built for security/vendor risk assessment workflows, a genuinely adjacent domain
  • Likely includes standard security-domain question banks (access control, data handling, etc.)
  • Part of QuestionPro's broader survey platform with logic and reporting features

Where it falls short

  • No adaptive AI-driven follow-up interviewing to probe vague or concerning vendor responses in real time
  • Vendor-facing focus means it won't capture internal team-level readiness signals like evidence storage location or time-to-produce-evidence
  • No published methodology for how responses are scored or weighted for risk

Ready to launch?

Open this template in the editor. Every part is yours to change before the first respondent sees it.

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