If you're running an AppSec program, you already know the uncomfortable truth: your ability to detect vulnerabilities has vastly outpaced your capacity to remediate them.
You've invested in scanning tools, built DevSecOps programs, launched security champion initiatives, and probably tried to shift security left more times than you can count. And yet, the backlog keeps growing. Critical flaws sit unpatched for months. Developers are frustrated. Your team is buried.
It's not a failure of effort. It's a systemic breakdown driven by brutal numbers and deeply ingrained workflow challenges. Here's what's actually happening—and why the traditional playbook isn't enough anymore.
The Problem in Numbers
The data shows a system at its breaking point.
Massive backlogs are the norm. Around 66% of organizations are wrestling with a backlog of over 100,000 vulnerabilities. If you're sitting on six figures of open findings, you're not an outlier—you're in the majority.
Fix times are exploding. Critical flaws now sit unpatched for an average of 252 days—a mean time to remediation (MTTR) that's increased 47% in just five years. Half of all organizations have at least one critical vulnerability that has remained open for more than a year.
Attackers are capitalizing on the gap. The exploitation of known vulnerabilities is now the second-most common breach vector, according to Verizon's 2025 DBIR. This trend jumped 34% year-over-year, with the average breach costing over $10 million in the U.S.
The math doesn't add up. Contrast Security's 2025 Software Under Siege report found that an average application generates about 17 new vulnerabilities a month, while AppSec teams only manage to fix about six.
We are creating security debt far faster than we can pay it down.
The Systemic Root Causes
The crisis stems from long-standing process gaps colliding with modern development velocity.
Accelerated Development & AI-Generated Code
Software development velocity has skyrocketed, amplified by AI coding assistants that can increase output by 25-70% depending on the study. While great for productivity, this means more code—often less-reviewed and less understood—is being deployed faster than ever.
Compounding this, studies find that roughly 30% of AI-generated code contains vulnerabilities. This creates an AI-induced backlog, flooding codebases with new flaws at a pace that dwarfs human capacity for review.
The 100:1 Workforce Imbalance
The industry average is 100 developers for every one application security engineer. This dramatic structural deficit creates an expertise gap where even the most talented security teams cannot possibly scale.
You lack the bandwidth to manually triage every finding, guide fixes, and hand-hold developers through remediation. It is a problem of sheer numbers, and you cannot hire your way out of it.
Ingrained Tooling and Workflow Friction
For the past two decades, AppSec innovation and investment have skewed heavily toward detection over resolution. This has created a fundamentally broken workflow that frustrates developers and overwhelms security teams.
The complexity of the modern stack: Applications today are not just first-party code. They are a complex assembly of open-source libraries (SCA), container images, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC), and third-party APIs. Each layer has its own scanners and alerts, inundating teams with a chaotic mix of SAST findings, dependency CVEs, container vulnerabilities, and cloud misconfigurations all at once.
The triage nightmare: With scanners producing a flood of alerts across this complex stack, manual triage becomes a crippling bottleneck. Distinguishing a true positive from a false positive, or a critical, exploitable flaw from a trivial one, requires hours of painstaking work by a skilled security analyst to trace code paths and understand context. With far more findings than there are skilled analysts, many alerts are ignored after a simple, scanner-based classification.
The "shove-left" problem: The industry's well-intentioned mantra to "shift security left" was meant to catch issues earlier. In practice, this often became "shoving left"—simply pushing noisy, high-friction scanning tools into the CI/CD pipeline or the developer's IDE.
This approach backfires when it breaks builds or creates real-time, interruptive nagging—especially when it doesn't provide a clear, efficient path to resolution. Today's solutions shift responsibility without providing enablement, frustrating developers and eroding trust between security and engineering.
Pervasive developer experience failures: The "shove-left" paradox contributes to poor developer experience. Many security tools are perceived as clunky, slow, and disconnected from modern workflows. If a tool generates a PDF report with outdated line numbers or requires logging into a separate portal hours after moving on from the code, it will be ignored. This friction creates an "action gap" where security and development operate in different worlds.
Misaligned incentives: A finding identified in the "security pane of glass" becomes a low-priority ticket in a developer's queue. Developers are rightfully measured on feature throughput, not on fixing security bugs from last quarter. Without a process that makes remediation nearly frictionless, security work will almost always lose the battle for priority against business objectives.
Responsibility without authority: Security teams excel at identifying vulnerabilities but often lack the direct ability or permission to commit code fixes. This means development teams are the sole path to remediation, leading to a dynamic where AppSec teams frequently remind developers about issues without the authority to resolve them directly.
The Inevitable Conclusion
These forces have created the widening gap between risk detection and risk reduction—the "find-but-never-fix" crisis.
Hiring more AppSec experts won't solve this fundamental capacity problem. These professionals are scarce and expensive, and the math simply doesn't work: an organization with hundreds of developers may employ only a handful of AppSec specialists. These experts must focus on high-level architecture and the most complex vulnerabilities—they cannot possibly guide every developer through every minor XSS fix.
The systemic shortcomings demand a fundamental shift in how we approach remediation. Rather than continuing to optimize detection while remediation lags behind, we need a new architectural component purpose-built to close this gap.
An effective solution must:
• Filter out noise by intelligently triaging alerts before they reach developers
• Operate at machine speed to keep pace with modern development velocity
• Integrate natively into developer workflows to eliminate friction
• Encode security expertise into automated security fixes, scaling knowledge across the entire organization
The tools must carry more weight, because people alone cannot scale to meet the challenge.
What's Next
The "find but never fix" crisis is real, and it's getting worse. Understanding the anatomy of the problem is the first step toward solving it.
In our full whitepaper, Burndown to Zero: The CISO's Playbook for Automated Security Remediation in the AI Era, we detail the architectural blueprint for a modern remediation engine, provide a practical framework for implementation and measuring ROI, and cast a vision for the future of self-healing software.
If you're ready to move beyond the endless cycle of alerts and tickets, the playbook is yours.
