The "Fix everything High/Critical in 30 days" policy is a standard in the industry, but in practice, this blanket approach often creates friction between security teams and developers.
When Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are rigid and disconnected from the reality of engineering cycles, they become "Zombie Tickets"—issues that stay open forever, ignored until an audit forces a panic. To improve remediation rates and developer workflows, you need SLAs that are dynamic, centralized, and automated.
Here is how you can move from "paper compliance" to active risk reduction using DefectDojo.
Most organizations inherit their SLAs from compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS, SOC2) without adjusting for their actual engineering capacity. The result is a typical workflow bottleneck:
To fix this, you need a platform that acts as a central referee, normalizing data so your SLAs actually mean something.
In a fragmented ecosystem where Snyk, Checkov, and SonarQube all have their own definitions of "High Severity," you need a centralized judge. DefectDojo ingests findings from over 200+ tools and normalizes them, allowing you to apply a single, unified SLA policy across your entire stack.
Before you set a deadline, you must agree on the severity. DefectDojo takes the raw data from your scanners and applies a consistent severity scale. This ensures that a "High" in your container scanner is treated with the same urgency as a "High" in your DAST tool, creating a sense of fairness that developers respect.
DefectDojo allows you to define granular SLA configurations that go beyond simple severity. You can customize timelines based on:
Pro Tip: Use DefectDojo’s "SLA Breaches" filter to instantly generate a list of vulnerabilities that have effectively "expired," allowing you to prioritize these for your next sprint.
An SLA is useless if it lives in a PDF on a SharePoint site. To work, it must live where the developers live. DefectDojo bridges this gap effectively.
When DefectDojo pushes a finding to Jira (or GitHub Issues), it doesn't just dump the data. It enables you to sync the remediation deadline. This transforms a security vulnerability into a standard engineering task with a clear due date.
This clarity empowers developers to plan their sprints. Instead of a vague "fix this soon," they see "This must be closed by Thursday to meet SLA."
Sometimes, a fix isn't possible within 30 days. Maybe it requires a major architectural refactor, or the risk is a false positive in your specific context. The fear of "SLA Breach" often forces devs to close tickets without properly fixing them.
DefectDojo solves this with built-in Risk Acceptance workflows. Developers can request an exception with a reason and expiration date. Security teams can approve or deny it directly in the platform. This keeps the SLA "green" while maintaining a transparent audit trail of why the risk remains.
Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR) is a useful metric, but it can be skewed by outliers. A better metric for the health of your program is SLA Compliance Rate.
DefectDojo’s dashboard visualizes this data instantly:
This gamifies security. You can show engineering leads exactly how their teams compare to the organizational average, driving competitive improvement rather than punitive shaming.
Writing a policy is easy. Enforcing it at scale is hard. By using DefectDojo as the central nervous system for your vulnerability management:
Don't just write SLAs. Operationalize them. Let DefectDojo handle the math so your developers can handle the code.