Giving the Backlog Teeth: What Enforcing Remediation SLOs Actually Requires

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every security leader has stared down a backlog of ignored vulnerabilities. You know the shape of it: thousands of open findings, tracked diligently, remediated rarely. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t care; it was that nothing was at stake for not fixing them.

I led a vulnerability-management program across a large engineering organization of thousands of developers and repositories. Early on I learned that you can’t improve what you don’t enforce. Here’s what actually happens when you give the backlog teeth, and the uncomfortable truth about what enforcing it really takes.

CISO on Cliff Hults

Giving the Backlog Teeth: What Enforcing Remediation SLOs Actually Requires