Security Debt Rarely Arrives All at Once but its Consequences Often Do
Published
Question: Many organizations are aware of unresolved vulnerabilities and remediation backlogs. From your observations, how can ISACA’s Security Debt Index help organizations identify when unresolved security gaps are turning into larger resilience risks? What steps should security teams prioritize?
Chetan Anand, Associate Vice President – Information Security and CISO at Profinch Solutions
Security Debt refers to the accumulation of unresolved security weaknesses in systems, applications, or processes due to shortcuts, legacy design decisions, or delayed remediation.
This can arise when organizations prioritize
- speed,
- cost savings, or
- feature delivery over security
- defer security fixes or upgrades and
- continue using outdated or vulnerable technologies
For example, security debt could look like a team shipping an application quickly by skipping input validation and planning to fix it later. The short-term gain in this case is faster release, while the long-term cost is injection vulnerability and a potential breach. That unresolved risk is the security debt.
Another example pertains to the provision of skilled resources. In the name of AI, a few organizations have begun to give the pink slip to their employees and have also put a freeze on hiring competent personnel.
Today, while this may account for cost savings, it can negatively impact the business relying on AI tomorrow.
Security debt is dangerous because it
- Increases the attack surface,
- Opening up more exploitable entry points,
- Amplifying breach impact as vulnerabilities persist longer,
- Raising remediation cost over time (exponential growth curve),
- Reducing agility as legacy constraints block modernization and
- Increasing regulatory risk of non-compliance penalties
- The lack of humans in the loop results in poor security governance
ISACA’s recent white paper, Security Debt: The Unseen Risk Undermining Cyber Resilience, explores the types, key drivers, lifecycle, and impacts of security debt, as well as insights into identifying, measuring, and quantifying security debt, including through its new Security Debt Index (SDI).
SDI considers three dimensions, each of which is scored on a normalized scale:
- Severity—the business impact of each issue
- Duration—how long the debt has remained unresolved
- Velocity—how quickly new issues of the same type appear
Most organizations monitor security risks via a risk register. Including security debt in the risk register can help organizations track debt, maintaining visibility throughout the process.
Each entry should identify
- the risk,
- its owner,
- the impact if left unaddressed,
- along with the estimated time,
- effort, and
- cost to fix it
Each risk line item can be mapped to one of the four types of security debt -
- technical and process debt
- business, leadership, and cultural debt
- modernization and innovation debt
- governance debt
Updated consistently, this helps encourage accountability. It can also be a practical tool for communicating regular progress with leadership and other interested parties, along with an analysis of the
- Severity
- Duration
- Velocity
- The analysis should help business leaders to make the right decision for security investment.
Another way to reduce security debt is by incorporating security into DevOps and adopting a zero-trust mindset. Security debt is not just a technical issue; it’s a business risk liability.
Organizations that proactively manage it reduce breach likelihood, improve resilience and enable secure innovation.
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