Significant progress has been made by security leaders in improving threat visibility across businesses. Most organisations can now identify vulnerabilities across their applications, dependencies, and development pipelines with far greater consistency than in the past. Yet, greater visibility has not translated into greater resilience. As a result, vulnerabilities are still being discovered faster than organisations can remediate them.
This has created a growing backlog of security debt. Today, 82% of organisations carry vulnerabilities that have remained unresolved for more than a year, while the proportion that are both severe and likely to be exploited continues to increase.
The result? Vulnerabilities are persisting in production environments long enough to be identified, exploited and weaponised by attackers.
Despite this growing risk, many CISOs must still convince the C-suite that reducing security debt is a business-wide issue that justifies sustained investment, rather than a challenge for security teams, exclusively.
Security debt must be tackled like financial debt
Business leaders must adjust their outlook to view security debt with the same level of scrutiny as they would financial debt. Like financial debt, security debt builds over time and compounds when left unmanaged, creating spiralling costs for the business. These costs rack up via delayed releases, emergency remediation efforts, audit findings, incident response and, ultimately, greater organisational risk.
Like financial debt, security debt demands active management rather than periodic damage control. Organisations 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 organisation’s overall risk increases.
Security debt belongs in the same category as other metrics boards already monitor, such as financial performance, operational resilience, and service reliability because each affects the organisation’s ability to operate. Most notably, it is a measurable indicator of organisational exposure and should be managed with the same level of oversight and accountability as any other business risk.
Addressing the capacity bottleneck
Most organisations already know where many of their security vulnerabilities exist but 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 convey this capacity gap in business terms. This involves highlighting the volume of vulnerabilities being discovered versus fixed, how long high-risk issues remain unresolved, and where critical systems remain exposed. Essentially, positioning 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.
The focus should be on reducing exposure, not simply counting vulnerabilities. Metrics, such as the number of exploitable vulnerabilities in critical systems, their average age, and overall security debt provide a far more meaningful view of organisational risk than traditional volume-based reporting.
Reducing security debt also requires the right operating model. Formal risk acceptance for unresolved high-risk issues, combined with dedicated engineering time, automation and AI-assisted remediation, can improve remediation throughput while enabling development teams to maintain pace.
Prioritise the vulnerabilities that carry the biggest threat to the business
Not every vulnerability presents the same level of risk. Severity scores such as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) can be useful, but they do not account for exploitability, enterprise context or whether an affected application is business critical.
Instead, organisations should combine severity, exploitability and organisational context to identify the small proportion of vulnerabilities that pose the greatest risk to the business. Every organisation has ‘crown jewel’ applications – whether customer-facing platforms, revenue-generating services or systems handling sensitive data – that should be prioritised for remediation.
In reality, only 11% of vulnerabilities are deemed both highly severe and exploitable. Focusing resources on this subset enables organisations 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 terms.
It's time to reposition the conversation around security debt
The impact of security debt extends far beyond the security function. It affects organisational resilience, regulatory compliance and, ultimately, a business’s ability to innovate and operate with confidence.
CISOs must reframe security debt as an enterprise risk rather than a technical IT backlog. When leadership understands the relationship between remediation capacity and business risk, investment and prioritisation decisions become more informed and effective.
Security debt will never be eliminated entirely. Instead, the objective is to measure it, govern it and reduce it over time. Organisations that invest in remediation capacity while prioritising the vulnerabilities that pose the greatest business risk will be best placed to strengthen resilience and manage cyber risk at scale.
Sohail Iqbal
Sohail Iqbal is Chief Information Security Officer at Veracode. A prominent figure in the cybersecurity community, Sohail is known for his exceptional leadership and hands-on expertise. He has successfully directed security practices and developed effective programs in roles such as Global Head of Cybersecurity Operations at Dow Jones/WSJ, CISO at J2 Global, and Head of Information Security at CarGurus.
