Security leaders have made significant progress in improving threat visibility across businesses.
Most organizations can now identify vulnerabilities across their applications, dependencies, and development pipelines with far more consistency than previously.
Yet, a fundamental imbalance remains — vulnerabilities are being discovered faster than they can be remediated.
CISO at Veracode.
This imbalance is growing. As it stands, the majority (82%) of organizations currently carry security debt, categorized as accumulated vulnerabilities that have remained unresolved for more than a year.
At the same time, the share of vulnerabilities that are both severe and likely to be exploited continues to increase.
As a result, vulnerabilities are persisting in production environments long enough to be discovered and weaponized.
Despite this growing risk, many CISOs still need to convince the C-suite that reducing security debt is a business-wide issue that justifies sustained investment, rather than a challenge limited only to security teams.
Treating security debt like financial debt
Business leaders must reframe their thinking to view security debt with the same level of scrutiny as they would financial debt. Like financial debt, security debt accumulates over time, compounding when left unmanaged to create spiraling costs for the business. Those costs appear in delayed releases, emergency remediation efforts, audit findings, incident response and, ultimately, greater organizational risk.
As with financial debt, security debt requires active management rather than periodic damage control. Organizations need to clearly understand how much security debt they are carrying, distinguish between the vulnerabilities that matter most, and make deliberate decisions about where to invest their remediation efforts. Without that discipline, the backlog continues to grow while the organization's overall risk increases.
Boards already monitor financial performance, operational resilience, and service reliability because each affects the organization's ability to operate. Security debt belongs in the same category. It is a measurable indicator of organizational exposure and should be managed with the same level of oversight and accountability as any other business risk.
Capacity is the key problem, not visibility
Most organizations already know where many of their security vulnerabilities exist, however are constrained when it comes to remediation capacity. When vulnerabilities are identified faster than engineering teams can resolve them, security debt continues to grow regardless of how sophisticated the detection tools they use are.
To secure buy-in from the wider C-suite, CISOs must demonstrate this capacity gap in business terms. This includes highlighting the volume of vulnerabilities being discovered versus fixed, how long high-risk issues remain unresolved and where critical systems remain exposed.
Framing remediation as an operational constraint makes it easier for executives to understand the wider business benefits of addressing it – from improving engineering capacity to reducing costs and maintaining service availability.
Success in reducing security debt should be measured by reducing exposure, not just counting the vulnerabilities that have been found or closed. Metrics such as the number of exploitable vulnerabilities in critical systems, their average age, and overall security debt provide a clearer picture of organizational risk.
Formal risk acceptance for unresolved high-risk issues, combined with dedicated engineering time, automation, and AI-assisted remediation, can significantly improve remediation throughput without slowing development.
Prioritize the vulnerabilities that create the greatest business risk
Crucially, not every vulnerability presents the same level of risk. While severity scores such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) can be useful, they do not account for exploitability, enterprise context or whether an affected application is business critical.
A more effective approach combines severity with exploitability alongside organizational context to identify the small percentage of vulnerabilities that are most likely to impact the business. Every organization has ‘crown-jewel’ applications – whether customer-facing platforms, revenue-generating services or applications handling sensitive data – and these should be prioritized for remediation.
To put this into perspective, 11% of vulnerabilities are deemed both highly severe and exploitable. Focusing resources on this subset enables organizations to reduce risk far more effectively than treating every vulnerability equally, while giving security leaders a clearer way to explain remediation priorities in business terms rather than technical jargon.
Reframing the conversation around security debt
The ripple effect of security debt extends beyond the security function. It influences resilience, regulatory compliance, and an organization's ability to operate software with confidence.
CISOs have an opportunity to reshape the conversation by framing security debt as an enterprise risk rather than a technical backlog. When leadership can understand the relationship between remediation capacity and business risk, decisions around investment and prioritization become far clearer.
Security debt will never be eradicated completely. What matters is how effectively it is measured, governed, and reduced over time. The businesses that invest in remediation capacity and focus on the vulnerabilities that matter most will be better positioned to control risk at scale.
We list the best antivirus software.
This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives, our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.
The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit