Picture this: a critical vulnerability hits your dependency tree. Security flags it as high-priority, but the development team pushes back because the upgrade breaks three integration tests. 

Sound familiar? You’re not alone. It’s the same story for countless organizations, and it potentially costs your team countless hours of development time and revenue lost. 

The Priority Gap

Security teams are vastly outnumbered, while developers often lack the incentive to prioritize these fixes beyond preventing release delays. 

Security scanners flood dashboards with hundreds of alerts, and because of the sheer quantity, development teams perceive most as noise. Because they lack incentive to prioritize these fixes, even legitimate vulnerabilities meet resistance, as teams look to avoid upgrades that can cause breaking changes or time-consuming fixes for vulnerabilities that can’t actually be reached.

In time, AppSec teams learn to emphasize fixing only the most critical issues to reduce friction and reiterate their importance to the development team. While this approach seems more collaborative, these teams still invest enormous effort only to settle for compromises that rarely meet their security objectives.

This gap in priorities creates a cycle of frustration, compromise, and mounting technical debt.

87% of organizations surveyed by ZEST earlier this year reported having a typical backlog of over 100 critical and under SLA security tickets. New threats are outpacing fixes for these teams as well, with 55 CVE remediation tickets typically opened in a given month, and just 10 expected to be closed in the same time frame.

Lost productivity and backlogs pile up, without a clear solution in sight. According to Gartner, 62% of development teams bear primary responsibility for vulnerability remediation; yet they often lack the context or tooling to execute quickly and safely.

Responsibility Without Control

With this gap between parts of the business, security teams face a difficult governance challenge.

They're held accountable for risk but rarely have the authority to act directly. Even when security teams show they're willing and capable of owning remediation, development leaders typically haven't built sufficient trust to grant that empowerment.

This dynamic produces predictable outcomes.

• Backlogs of unresolved security tickets that grow faster than they shrink
• Development delays caused by unclear or untrusted remediation guidance
• Mounting frustration between teams who genuinely want to do the right thing but can't find a reliable path forward

Both sides suffer from this broken system, but the business bears the ultimate cost through accumulated risk and reduced development velocity.

On average, developers lose 8–15 hours per week to manual patching and debugging (GitHub, 2023). For a 50-developer mid-sized company, even a conservative 3 hours per week per developer equates to $600K–$1M annually in diverted productivity (Ponemon).

With lost productivity at this scale, everyone loses. So how do teams make things better?

Two Paths to Resolution

The path forward requires choosing between two sustainable approaches. Make remediation frictionless for developers, or remove it from their plate entirely. 

Data like we see from the ZEST survey makes it clear: half-measures like adding security tickets to backlogs or pasting CVE links into Jira aren't solutions and only widen the existing gap that the two teams need to bridge.

The first approach, making remediation frictionless, demands defining a unified goal across three dimensions.

• People need clear ownership boundaries, relevant context, and mutual trust. The more organizationally fragmented security and engineering become, the harder this gets. Teams must develop a shared understanding of actual risk levels and "good enough" thresholds.
• Process must align with existing developer workflows. If remediation requires tools nobody uses or workflows outside Git, it stalls. The simpler the review-test-merge cycle becomes, the faster fixes ship.
• Technology must handle the heavy lifting through automatic patching, comprehensive regression testing, and minimal-diff pull requests. These capabilities have evolved from nice-to-have features to operational requirements for maintaining development flow while scaling security.

When friction-reduction isn't sufficient (when priorities conflict or remediation windows are tight), security teams should act directly. However, this requires earning organizational trust through demonstrated competence and restraint.

Security teams that successfully gain direct remediation authority typically follow a consistent pattern. They start by flawlessly executing low-risk, high-impact fixes that developers readily approve. 

They invest in automated testing pipelines that provide confidence in their changes. They communicate proactively about what they're changing and why. Over time, they expand their scope as trust builds.

This approach works because it addresses the underlying trust deficit that creates the representation gap. Development leaders become comfortable granting authority when security teams consistently show technical competence and business alignment.

Make Security Scalable with Seal

While security teams could create their own systemic approach to remediating vulnerabilities, this would require countless hours of tedious manual work and bring unnecessary risk into a process designed specifically to reduce both.

That’s where tools like Seal Security can come in.

Seal creates patched versions of the open source libraries, containers, and operating systems that your development team relies on, and gives your organization the ability to patch open source CVEs in just one click without breaking changes.

This means that you can fix vulnerabilities in just seconds, and your development team doesn’t need to worry about any time-consuming migrations until it is absolutely necessary for your development goals.

Our tools are trusted by teams all over the open source community, from compliance-focused Fortune 500 organizations to mid-market companies looking to unlock extra hours in their day. Regardless of the open source problem you are trying to solve, we make it easier for your business to do the work that matters and drive results.

Reach out to our team and see how you can use Seal to take control of your open source security here.