AGCG Genuine
Consulting Group

Automated scanners, weekly reports, CVSS scoring, patching plans, governance committees… On paper, vulnerability management appears well under control. Indicators exist, processes are defined, and review bodies are established.

In reality, this framework often masks a silent phenomenon: the vulnerability backlog grows relentlessly, is rarely reduced, and evolves into a massive cyber debt. This invisible “sand pile” accumulates month after month. No one truly examines it. No one reports it clearly. Until the day an incident suddenly reveals a vulnerability “known for 18 months”… but never remediated.

For AGCG Genuine Consulting Group, the backlog has become one of the most underestimated silent failures of modern cybersecurity.

1.1. A Legacy IT Model No Longer Suited to Today’s Cyber Volumes

Vulnerability management often relies on a linear logic: “detect → classify → remediate.” A model inherited from early 2000s patch management. Except that:

• a single system can surface thousands of vulnerabilities in one scan,
• Cloud environments evolve continuously,
• software dependencies are exploding,
• shadow IT multiplies exposure surfaces,
• responsibilities are so diluted that no one is truly accountable.

The model has not changed — but the scale has increased by a factor of 100.

---

1.2. Teams Receive Reports… but Not Decisions

Scanners generate thousands of lines, context-free CVEs, technical CVSS scores, and abstract severity labels. Cyber teams are expected to prioritize, yet they lack the mandate, business arbitration, and budget insights required to make binding decisions.

The result: remediation happens opportunistically — based on alerts or audits — while the backlog grows mechanically, driven by the absence of structural decisions from the Executive Committee or the CIO.

---

1.3. A Backlog Polluted by Old Vulnerabilities, False Positives, and Nonexistent Assets

One of the systemic issues of any backlog is its intrinsic noise:

• decommissioned assets still appearing in tools,
• duplicates,
• false positives never purged,
• vulnerabilities already remediated but not rescanned,
• migrated perimeters and forgotten intermediate environments,
• fragmented IT ownership and unclear responsibilities.

Between 25% and 40% of a typical backlog may simply be useless noise — never cleaned.

---

1.4. No Explicit Link Between Vulnerabilities and Business Impact

Organizations assess vulnerabilities using CVSS, but executives make decisions based on business impact. As long as cybersecurity does not clearly translate vulnerabilities into:

• availability,
• confidentiality,
• integrity,
• financial exposure,
• critical dependencies, business continuity, brand reputation,

…remediation will never appear as a priority for business leaders and the Executive Committee.

---

1.5. Teams Working Reactively Without a Structured Roadmap

Without a clear trajectory, the operating pattern is always the same:

• fix what triggers the loudest alerts,
• treat what appears in reports,
• respond to audits and regulatory inspections,
• “manage tickets” instead of managing a risk portfolio.

No one truly manages:

• historical debt,
• application debt,
• infrastructure debt,
• Cloud debt,
• organizational debt.

The backlog is not a technical issue — it is a strategic debt.

“The vulnerability backlog is not an operational detail: it is one of the most revealing indicators of an organization’s loss of cyber control.”

— AGCG Genuine Consulting Group

2.1. An Invisible Yet Massive Cyber Debt

A backlog of 20,000 vulnerabilities is not an operational issue. It is a governance signal that reveals an accumulation of:

• technical debt,
• architecture debt,
• process debt,
• organizational debt.

Every unremediated vulnerability is a non-arbitrated risk. The backlog quantifies the gap between the risk level an organization believes it has accepted… and the risk level it actually bears.

---

2.2. A Growing Loss of Control Accelerated by the Cloud

Multi-cloud, containers, CI/CD pipelines, microservices: attack surfaces have exploded, dependencies multiply, and architectures constantly recompose themselves. An exploding backlog is often the symptom of an under-governed Cloud environment:

• lack of robust tagging,
• orphaned or untracked environments,
• shared perimeters managed across multiple teams,
• unsecured pipelines deploying vulnerable images continuously.

---

2.3. A Perception Bias That Misleads Executives

Executives often assume that “if there were a real issue, someone would have escalated it.” But cybersecurity teams filter, simplify, and escalate only what they feel is “presentable” — sometimes out of pedagogy, sometimes out of fear of raising alarms without solutions.

The consequence: the Executive Committee and CIO are blind to the true scale of the debt. The backlog remains an unspoken strategic issue, when in reality it should be a core indicator of resilience governance.

Across our engagements (financial services, industry, transportation, retail, public sector), AGCG has developed a structured four-step approach to transform a passive backlog into a managed trajectory.

3.1. Backlog Cleanup: The Most Underrated Phase

We always start with a systematic cleanup effort:

• deduplication,
• removal of obsolete or decommissioned assets,
• purging false positives,
• validation rescans on critical perimeters,
• segmentation of the backlog by perimeter (applications, infrastructure, Cloud, subsidiaries, environments).

Between 25% and 40% of the backlog disappears instantly, restoring clarity and credibility to the numbers.

---

3.2. Business-Driven Prioritization: The Only Approach That Works

Each vulnerability — or group of vulnerabilities — is connected to:

• the application or asset concerned,
• the business process it supports,
• the criticality of the asset,
• internal and external dependencies,
• associated regulatory or contractual constraints.

This contextualization reveals:

• the 3 real emergencies,
• the 5 structural levers,
• the invisible critical debt absent from technical reports.

---

3.3. Building a 6- to 18-Month Debt-Reduction Plan

The backlog cannot be addressed “opportunistically.” It requires structured remediation waves:

• by perimeter (critical applications, Cloud environments, network infrastructure…),
• by workstreams (application / infrastructure / Cloud),
• by programs (domain-based debt reduction, using a ROSI-driven model),
• with explicit KPIs (monthly reduction per perimeter, residual debt, effort spent).

---

3.4. Establishing Executive Committee Oversight

The Executive Committee and CIO finally receive a consolidated view:

• debt by perimeter and by domain,
• a visual reduction trajectory,
• non-arbitrated risks highlighted,
• ROSI by workstream,
• effort vs. impact — in a language executives can act upon.

From there, the Executive Committee can decide to:

• fund specific remediation programs,
• mitigate or accept certain risks,
• re-architect systems that have become unsustainable,
• disinvest from obsolete perimeters.

The vulnerability backlog is not a simple “queue of issues” to be addressed when time permits. It is a strategic indicator of loss — or recovery — of control.

When it is not actively governed:

• cyber debt grows,
• risks increase,
• teams become exhausted,
• decision-making fragments,
• incidents become inevitable.

When it is brought under control:

• debt decreases visibly,
• prioritization becomes clear,
• governance strengthens,
• executives regain visibility,
• cybersecurity becomes a transformation enabler, not an unavoidable cost center.

Today, the vulnerability backlog is one of the most revealing governance signals of an organization’s cybersecurity maturity. It marks the boundary between:

• an organization that endures its debt,
• and an organization that actively manages its resilience.

Experience from AGCG shows that a structured, business-driven, and consolidated approach not only cleanses the debt, but more importantly restores operational control and executive confidence.

The backlog does not fail because it is large. It fails because it is not addressed at the right level: the level of strategic decision-making. Our role at AGCG is precisely to make it legible, actionable, and meaningful — at last.