When security professionals talk about service level agreements (SLAs), the discussion tends to drift into checkboxes and compliance. But for application security teams managing sprawling software portfolios, SLAs are more than policy—they’re promises. Promises that vulnerabilities will be remediated before they metastasize. Promises that risk won’t languish indefinitely in someone’s Jira backlog. Promises that security won’t be a suggestion.
Yet for all the weight AppSec SLAs carry, most organizations still struggle to define them, measure them, or hold teams accountable to them. In the age of AI-generated code, increasing attack automation, and real-world exploitation timelines that shrink by the hour, that’s a problem that security teams—and their business stakeholders—can no longer ignore.
SLAs Are a Governance Tool, Not Just a Timer
At their best, AppSec SLAs act as a bridge between teams with often competing priorities: development and security. They translate abstract security concerns into concrete expectations. What needs to be fixed, by whom, and by when? And just as importantly: why does it matter?
The answers shouldn’t be vague. They should reflect real-world risk and enable measurable accountability. That means SLAs must go beyond arbitrary deadlines. They must align with business context, exploitability likelihood, and production impact.
Too often, however, organizations adopt one-size-fits-all timelines based solely on CVSS scores. A critical vulnerability? Fix it in 15 days. High? You’ve got a month. But this method misses the mark. Not all “criticals” are created equal. And not every CVSS 7.1 is worth diverting sprint resources.
For example:
- Problem: SLA timelines may ignore real-world risk signals: Fix-by dates often fail to consider whether a vulnerability is actively exploited in the wild (per CISA’s KEV catalog) or easily exploitable (as indicated by EPSS scores).
- Problem: SLAs lack business relevance: Without factoring in asset exposure or data sensitivity, teams may scramble to patch issues in low-risk test environments while leaving high-risk production services vulnerable.
The result? Teams waste time. Vulnerabilities pile up. Compliance reports look fine—until they don’t. Because the exploit was live. And the patch, despite being tracked in a spreadsheet, never got shipped.
What a Maturing SLA Program Actually Looks Like
Let’s be clear: setting SLAs isn’t the hard part. Enforcing them is. Especially when developers are overworked, alerts are noisy, and remediation requires context that no tool currently delivers in one place. To address this, AppSec programs need to evolve in three key ways:
- Prioritization must be risk-driven, not score-driven: CVSS is a starting point, not an end point. Modern prioritization requires layering in business impact (does the app handle PII?), exploitability (is it in EPSS top 5%?), exposure (is it internet-facing?), and operational context (is the code path even reachable?). Without this multi-factor model, SLA targets remain arbitrary and misaligned.
- Automation is essential for enforcement at scale: Tracking every vulnerability, mapping it to an SLA category, creating tickets, assigning the right team, following up, and reporting on progress—it’s a full-time job. Actually, it’s several. That’s why AppSec teams are turning to Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) platforms. These tools can automatically categorize findings, trigger remediation workflows, track SLA breaches, and surface meaningful trends over time.
- Visibility must extend from code to cloud: SLA compliance doesn’t just happen in the codebase. It happens when fixes are deployed—and stay deployed. That means teams need visibility across build systems, runtime environments, and even API exposure. The only way to confirm a vulnerability is remediated is to verify it no longer exists where the code runs.
The Real SLA Metric Isn’t Time—It’s Trust
So what should CISOs and AppSec leads track? Mean time to remediate (MTTR) is still a gold standard, but it’s only useful when measured in the context of exploitability. Similarly, tracking SLA adherence by severity alone is misleading. Instead, organizations should ask:
- Are our most exploitable vulnerabilities being fixed first?
- Are developers being asked to patch things that don’t matter?
- Are remediation efforts aligned with how real attackers operate?
When the answers are “yes,” that’s when SLAs become meaningful. Not because they enforce deadlines, but because they build trust—between security and engineering, between business units and auditors, and between your organization and its customers.
AppSec SLAs with OX Security
There was a time when manually tracking AppSec SLAs with spreadsheets, filters, or ticket timestamps might have sufficed. But that time has passed. Today’s security and development teams don’t need more dashboards—they need clarity. They need SLA expectations that are rooted in real risk, not artificial timelines, and they need tools that enforce accountability without becoming another burden.
That’s why OX built SLA Management directly into our platform. Not as an add-on or a reporting gimmick, but as a foundational feature that:
- Supports real-time visibility
- Automates repetitive tracking
- Integrates cleanly with CI/CD workflows
By embedding SLA logic into the systems teams already use, OX eliminates manual guesswork and connects the dots between detection, triage, and action. And with built-in reporting capabilities designed for both engineers and executives, OX makes it easier to have the conversations that reduce risk.
This isn’t just about hitting a deadline. It’s about ensuring teams can focus on the issues that matter most. With OX, that becomes the new default, not the exception.
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