While debt can be a powerful tool for growth, unchecked, it becomes a crushing burden. In cybersecurity, we have our own version of “security debt,” and nowhere is this debt more acute than in application security. It’s the ever-growing backlog of vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and software risks that we promise to fix later. For years, this model of finding issues in production and adding them to a remediation list has defined the industry, creating a list that only ever seems to get longer.
This model is fundamentally broken.
Today, two powerful forces are acting as relentless accelerators of this security debt. First, the sheer velocity of DevOps means code is deployed faster than ever. Second, the explosion of AI-generated code is set to dominate development. In fact, some predict that by 2030, AI could produce 95% of all code, as AI coding assistants move from generating simple scripts to authoring complex application logic. And with research indicating that a third of that code may introduce security issues, the scale of our security debt is poised to skyrocket. This represents a paradigm shift of unprecedented scale, with the consequence that security vulnerabilities are now created at a speed and scale that completely outstrip any human-centric model of remediation.
The traditional approach of trying to identify issues late in the cycle is a losing battle. Statistics show that only about 10% of security issues in production are remediated each month. This creates a costly cycle, as our data indicates that it takes, on average, 10 times longer to remediate an issue in production than at the source. The mistake is chasing risks instead of preventing them, and the interest on our security debt is compounding into unacceptable levels of business risk.
Prevention Powered by Context
To escape this cycle, companies must shift their entire philosophy of application security from reactive remediation to proactive prevention. The goal is to automatically prevent insecure code from ever reaching production, freeing developers to innovate faster by fixing issues efficiently during development instead of chasing them in production. Our data shows that by shifting left, teams can eliminate up to 92% of security issues before they reach production.
This is an achievable goal, but it requires a new architectural approach built on a single, non-negotiable principle: using complete context to drive prevention. This isn’t just about collecting data; it’s about using a unified understanding of your application’s posture, from code to cloud, to craft more targeted prevention policies, prioritize risk with greater precision, automate remediation workflows and better connect security to business priorities.
Legacy security tools fail because they are too noisy and lack context. This often overwhelms developers with alerts on issues that may not be exploitable or critical, contributing to a sense of ‘friction’ in the business, which then leads to the removal of important security guardrails. A more mature approach begins by prioritizing findings from native and third-party scanners. But a true prevention-first model achieves the highest level of maturity by intelligently correlating data from every source, from developer tools and application infrastructure all the way to cloud runtime environments.
Armed with this complete, code-to-cloud context, we can finally build intelligent and targeted prevention policies. By creating a single, correlated view of risk, we can build “guardrails” that are precise enough to automatically block the critical issues that truly matter before they are committed, while allowing other development to proceed without friction. This approach empowers AppSec teams to reduce application risk by preventing problems with surgical precision and its efficacy is only getting stronger.
Security + Development to Pay Down the Debt
This context-driven, prevention-first model provides a dual benefit: it stops new risks and provides the tools to remediate existing backlog at scale. By creating that single view of application posture, teams can move beyond chasing alerts and begin intelligently prioritizing the security issues that pose a genuine threat, based on runtime behavior. Furthermore, by integrating security directly into developer workflows — delivering real-time feedback and automated remediation suggestions through integrations into the tools they use every day — we can unite security and development teams. This seamless collaboration streamlines the remediation of existing issues and ensures new ones are caught early, when they are fastest and cheapest to fix.
The goal is to transform security from a blocker into a business enabler. This modern, prevention-first philosophy is the driving force behind Application Security Posture Management (ASPM). By shifting left and using complete context to prevent risks, we pay down our security debt, reduce friction, and empower our developers to innovate safely at the speed the business demands. It is this philosophy that we have built into our own platform, to give every organization the power to secure innovation from code to cloud.
To learn more about ASPM, join us for our virtual event.
