The Fallacy of Cybersecurity by Backlog: Why Counting Patches Will Never Make You Secure
By a Former Engineer Turned Cybersecurity Leader
For much of my twenty years as a software and security engineer, and now as a cybersecurity executive, I have watched organizations cling to a deeply flawed belief: that security maturity is reflected in the length of the patch backlog, the volume of vulnerabilities closed, or the number of tickets resolved in a quarter. Entire cultures are built around these metrics. Dashboards glow green when patch counts dip. Leaders celebrate the deletion of Jira, SNOW, etc. tickets as if the act of closing them somehow hardened the enterprise. But this fixation on downstream remediation creates an illusion of control while masking the fundamental problem upstream, there is an innovation pipeline that lacks guardrails, architectural clarity, and secure defaults. The symptom becomes the scorecard, and the root cause remains untouched often under a guise of promoting freedom.
Security teams often find themselves in a perpetual treadmill of “forever fixing”, constantly reacting to the last sprint’s feature work, the last deployment cycle, the last proof of concept turned product, the last misconfiguration, or the last rushed architectural decision. When the organization’s control plane for innovation is insecure by design, when new products, services, and platforms can be built without friction but also without any embedded security primitives, then no amount of patching will ever catch up. Each remediation cycle becomes a tax on innovation rather than an enabler of it. Patching becomes not a measure of progress, but a measure of entropy.
This reactive culture grows naturally in environments where engineering velocity is prized but secure design is treated as an afterthought. When teams ship first and secure later, security becomes a janitorial function, cleaning up the debris of decisions made upstream with little context or governance. Vulnerability backlogs balloon not because engineers are careless, but because the system in which they create has no opinion about security. The absence of friction at the beginning becomes a mountain of toil at the end. Organizations then respond by hiring more analysts, adding more scanners, and building more dashboards, all in an attempt to treat the fever rather than the infection.
The real tragedy is that this model stifles innovation rather than enabling it. The narrative that “security slows things down” emerges precisely because security engages too late, after the creativity, architecture, and implementation have already solidified. By the time a vulnerability is discovered downstream, remediation is a disruptive tax. Engineers resent it not because they lack concern for security, but because the process is inefficient and divorced from their flow of work. When your measure of security is the volume of things you fixed rather than the volume of problems you prevented, then the organization is not progressing... the Organization is treading water.
A different model exists, and the most successful security programs have already begun adopting it. Security must be redefined as an upstream enabler of safe innovation. Guardrails, not gates, must be embedded in the control plane of how ideas become software. Secure defaults should eliminate entire classes of vulnerabilities before they ever have a chance to materialize. Tooling, libraries, infrastructure patterns, and paved-road platforms should make the insecure choice the hardest one, not the easiest. When engineering teams have the means to innovate safely by default, the need for downstream remediation plummets, and the security function shifts from reactive patchwork to proactive capability building.
This transition requires a change in mindset as much as a change in architecture. Security teams must stop measuring their worth by the number of patches applied or vulnerabilities detected or triaged. Instead, they should measure the reduction in novel vulnerabilities introduced, the adoption of secure-by-default platforms, the frictionless integration of threat modeling into design, and the speed at which teams can safely experiment. True maturity is demonstrated not by how fast you fix, but by how rarely you need to. Innovation accelerates when the foundational layers are trustworthy.
Ultimately, the question every leader should ask is simple:
If your security program disappeared tomorrow, would innovation become more dangerous, or would it simply become slower because no one was pushing patches?
If the latter is true, you do not have a security program. You have a ticket factory.
Cybersecurity must evolve beyond patch-counting cultures and ivory-tower governance. It must become an engineering discipline focused on shaping the environment in which software is created. When security enables builders instead of chasing them, the entire organization becomes safer, more agile, and more capable of pursuing bold ideas without fear of invisible risk accumulating beneath them. The future belongs to companies that secure their innovation pipelines, not their ticket queues.