James's post — est. reading time: 12 min

In the high-pressure world of modern software delivery, development teams face constant trade-offs. Whether it’s racing to deliver new features or meeting a high-stakes launch deadline, speed often dominates the conversation. In pursuit of velocity, shortcuts get taken. Corners are cut. And quietly, technical debt begins to accumulate behind the scenes.

Most teams recognize technical debt as the cost of quick fixes: hastily written code, outdated dependencies, or architecture that’s patched rather than planned. But what gets overlooked is a more insidious variant—security debt. When teams deprioritize updates, delay patches, or leave misconfigurations unaddressed in favor of shipping faster, the consequence isn’t just messy code—it’s systemic risk.

Unchecked technical debt doesn’t just slow teams down—it leaves systems vulnerable. And eventually, the interest on that debt is paid not in developer hours, but in data breaches, downtime, and reputational damage.

Understanding Technical Debt—and Its Security Variant

Technical debt was first described as a metaphor for the long-term cost of short-term engineering decisions. Like financial debt, it can be useful when controlled and dangerous when ignored. The interest compounds quietly—through fragility, complexity, and unanticipated failure points.

When it comes to security, the stakes are higher. Security debt includes outdated libraries with known vulnerabilities, legacy code lacking modern controls, hardcoded secrets, exposed APIs, and unpatched systems quietly running in production. Each represents a potential doorway for attackers. A seemingly harmless shortcut—a deferred update or skipped hardening step—can become the very flaw that leads to a breach.

A Real-World Example: From Delay to Disaster

A global logistics provider learned this lesson the hard way. During a product rollout, engineers flagged a vulnerable open-source library embedded in a core service. A patch was available, but applying it would have introduced testing delays. The fix was postponed—a minor risk, they thought.

Six months later, that very vulnerability was exploited in a ransomware attack. Core backend systems were encrypted. Deliveries ground to a halt. It took three days to resume operations. The financial impact was steep—but the trust lost with partners and customers was even more damaging.

What began as a “temporary” decision became a multimillion-dollar failure. The debt had matured, and the interest was due.

The Hidden Cost of Security Debt

Unlike a buggy feature or a failing test, security debt often remains invisible—until it causes real damage. These flaws lurk quietly behind functioning applications, invisible to the user and sometimes even to the teams maintaining them. But once they surface, the consequences can be sweeping and severe.

Systems burdened with unaddressed technical debt become harder to understand, maintain, and secure. When a breach occurs, fragile infrastructure slows down response efforts. The lack of documentation, outdated tooling, or missing controls makes containment difficult, investigation complex, and recovery expensive.

Compliance violations are another risk. Unpatched systems and ignored vulnerabilities can quickly run afoul of regulations like GDPR or HIPAA, where delayed fixes translate directly into legal exposure.

And then there’s morale. Teams firefighting issues that stem from unstable foundations burn out. Trust erodes—both internally and externally. Security debt that once seemed harmless begins to fracture the team’s ability to move forward.

Why Security Debt Persists: Four Core Challenges

Security debt doesn’t linger because teams are careless—it lingers because of systemic pressure and design. It hides behind the illusion of stability and is fed by well-meaning decisions made under pressure.

First, most security flaws don’t interfere with core functionality. A vulnerable authentication mechanism may perform perfectly under normal usage—even as it remains exploitable. These issues are functionally invisible, which makes them easier to deprioritize.

Second, product teams are evaluated by the features they ship—not by the vulnerabilities they fix. Business pressure fuels an incentive system where speed is rewarded more than sustainability.

Third, security responsibility is fragmented. Vulnerabilities often exist at the intersection of infrastructure, code, and configuration. When ownership is unclear, action is deferred. The problem becomes someone else’s job—until it’s everyone’s problem.

Finally, fear holds teams back. Fixing security issues in legacy systems can trigger regressions or unexpected failures. The complexity feels daunting, so problems are postponed, even as their risk increases.

Strategies to Manage Technical Debt Without Compromising Security

Managing security-related technical debt requires more than intention—it demands a structured approach. Organizations that succeed combine visibility, prioritization, automation, and a culture of continuous improvement.

First, establish a dedicated register for security debt. This register, much like a product backlog, tracks issues such as outdated libraries, exposed secrets, manual configurations, or deprecated services. Each item should carry a severity rating, an owner, and a documented status. Visibility is the first step to accountability.

Next, automate wherever possible. Continuous scanning tools can help identify risks in code, dependencies, infrastructure, and runtime environments. These should be integrated directly into the development pipeline, providing developers with real-time feedback in the environments they use every day.

Security issues should not live outside sprint cycles. By assigning them story points and tracking them through existing planning systems, teams embed security into delivery. This also helps business stakeholders see security work as part of progress—not as a distraction from it.

When issues are uncovered, adopt a 'fix forward' mentality. Instead of patching over symptoms, invest in solving the underlying cause—whether that means eliminating unsafe dependencies, redesigning fragile systems, or tightening enforcement across deployment.

Hold regular risk reviews that include engineering, security, and operations. These reviews help re-prioritize unresolved issues and keep debt visible as roadmaps evolve. A living discussion about risk helps align remediation with reality—and maintains focus as pressure grows.

Culture Change: From Reactive to Responsible

At its heart, managing security debt is not just a technical task—it’s a cultural transformation. Teams must stop viewing security as a task to squeeze in when there’s time, and start treating it as a shared value. This requires not just tools and tracking, but mindset and motivation.

Organizations that succeed in managing security debt reward risk reduction the same way they celebrate feature releases. They run blameless postmortems, not to assign fault, but to learn. They train developers in secure design as part of onboarding. They normalize challenging unrealistic timelines when those timelines create unsafe shortcuts.

In this environment, engineering health becomes as important as feature velocity. Security isn't just the domain of a few specialists—it becomes part of everyone’s craft.

Case Study: From Vulnerabilities to Visibility

A global e-commerce company discovered over 200 unresolved vulnerabilities across its microservices stack—many dormant for more than a year. Most were low to medium risk, but some had publicly known exploits. The team decided to face the problem head-on.

They launched a focused 60-day initiative aimed at clearing the backlog. Each vulnerability was categorized by severity. Ownership was assigned to specific teams. Scans were added to daily builds, and results were tracked on a transparent dashboard accessible company-wide.

The results were transformative. Over 85% of issues were closed. Time-to-remediation dropped dramatically. Developers began engaging more proactively in threat modeling and secure coding training.

By turning an invisible burden into a visible, shared priority, they didn't just reduce risk—they improved morale, trust, and clarity across teams.

Leadership’s Role: Making Security Sustainable

Security and technical debt aren’t just engineering concerns—they are executive priorities. Leaders set the tone for whether security is treated as a nuisance, a box to check, or a competitive advantage.

Leaders must ensure teams have the time and support to do secure work. That includes allocating engineering cycles for refactoring, prioritizing security debt in quarterly planning, and including risk metrics in product dashboards.

It also means championing a no-blame culture—one where risk disclosure is celebrated, not penalized. When leaders emphasize learning and resilience, they unlock the team’s ability to address security with energy and confidence.

Measuring Progress: From Blind Spots to Benchmarks

Tracking the health of your security-related technical debt isn’t just about reporting up—it’s about recognizing how far you’ve come and where you still need to grow. Progress is best measured both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Quantitative metrics might include how many vulnerabilities have been resolved over time, the average time it takes to remediate high-severity risks, or how many builds are blocked due to unresolved security issues. These numbers paint a clear picture of movement.

But culture counts too. Developer participation in secure coding efforts, the frequency of cross-functional risk reviews, and the ratio of permanent fixes to quick patches all indicate how deeply security has been embedded in your software process.

When these signals are tracked over time, they become guideposts—helping leaders steer progress and teams stay aligned.

Security Debt in the Age of Scale, AI, and Cloud

Software systems are growing faster and more distributed than ever. Cloud-native deployments, edge computing, and AI-powered tools all expand the attack surface and multiply the ways in which technical debt can accumulate.

Security debt in this world can be subtle: an over-permissive role in a cloud policy, a temporary container without logging, an AI agent accessing sensitive data without encryption. These aren’t theoretical concerns—they’re the new battleground for risk.

As teams adopt these technologies, they must also adopt new diligence. What’s invisible today may be tomorrow’s incident headline.

A Final Reflection for Every Team and Leader

Most breaches aren’t the result of sophisticated exploits. They stem from known weaknesses that were deprioritized or forgotten.

The real test is simple: if your most valuable system were compromised tomorrow, could you trace the issue back to something your team knew about—but never got around to fixing?

Managing security debt is more than a checklist. It’s a declaration: that resilience matters as much as velocity, and that sustainability is inseparable from success.