Smarter, Scalable Approach to Cybersecurity Compliance

Roee Shohat, Head of Solution Architecture

April 17, 2025

5 min read

Why resolving vulnerabilities depends on more than just detection—and how to align the right people, fast.

In vulnerability management, detection is only the starting point. Every alert uncovered by a scanner—whether from code, cloud, or infrastructure—triggers a more difficult question: Who’s responsible for fixing this?

That answer is rarely straightforward.

In modern enterprises, stakeholders involved in remediation span across functions: developers, DevOps engineers, IT admins, project managers, and even external contributors. But most organizations still rely on manual methods to identify who owns what, tracing resource metadata, Slack threads, or repo histories just to assign a ticket.

The result? Delays, dropped tasks, and wasted cycles.

Security teams need a better way to identify and engage the right stakeholders to remediate at scale—fast, automatically, and aligned with their existing structure.

Understanding Who’s Involved in Fixing Vulnerabilities

Security doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Here’s a breakdown of the three stakeholder types most commonly involved in remediation—and why their needs matter.

1. Practitioners (e.g. developers, SREs, DevOps)

They’re responsible for executing the fix, often under time pressure and with limited security context. Remediation success depends on whether the task is relevant, actionable, and integrated into their normal workflow.

2. Resource Allocators (e.g. team leads, project managers)

They determine when and how remediation gets prioritized across other engineering demands. Without clear ownership signals and business context, their teams are likely to push remediation tasks down the queue.

3. End Users or Customers

Their concerns are typically indirect—but critical. Remediation work often comes with service risks (downtime, regression), so updates need to be timed carefully to avoid disruption.

Successful remediation isn’t just about fixing the vulnerability—it’s about aligning these different perspectives to execute smoothly.

The Real Problem: Finding the Right Person (or Team)

Manually identifying resource owners is time-consuming, unreliable, and doesn’t scale. In cloud-native environments, even something as simple as “who deployed this EC2 instance?” can turn into an hours-long investigation.

Security teams often juggle:

Git histories with missing contributor details
Cloud resources with no tagging or ownership fields
Infrastructure deployed by CI/CD tools with shared accounts
Orphaned assets due to turnover or contractor churn

This is just to assign a ticket that might not get picked up.

What’s needed is a structured and automated approach to mapping findings to stakeholders.

Two Proven Strategies for Identifying Owners

1. Business Unit Mapping

Structure remediation responsibilities by business units or resource groups. Each unit is associated with a primary owner—usually a team lead or engineering manager.

Why it works:

Simplifies ownership resolution for most alerts
Reduces friction between security and engineering
Enables prioritization by business risk or operational impact

Limitations: Requires upfront planning, and edge cases can still fall through the cracks (shared ownership, ambiguous resource scope, etc.).

2. Resource Creator Attribution

Trace a resource to the person who created it using infrastructure metadata, git commit histories, or audit logs.

Why it works:

Highly precise, especially for newer resources
Encourages accountability across engineering teams

Limitations:

Breaks down with contractor turnover or shared tool users
Logs like CloudTrail can expire or lack granular data
Requires tooling to correlate logs with specific alerts

Real-World Examples: Applying Both Approaches

Let’s walk through how these methods work in practice.

Scenario 1: SAST Alert from Code Repository

You receive a high-severity vulnerability tied to a package.json file.
Using git blame, the security engineer identifies the last person to modify the package. But that developer is no longer with the company. Now what?

Use the repo platform to find the current team lead
Reference the business unit ownership map to assign the ticket
Escalate to the Allocator when needed, ensuring the task is triaged appropriately

Scenario 2: Misconfigured EC2 Instance

An EC2 instance shows a misconfiguration, but the metadata lacks owner details.
You attempt to locate the creator via CloudTrail logs, but they’re expired. Jenkins logs only show a CI service account.

Instead of chasing logs, use EC2 tagging standards (e.g. Owner, Service, CostCenter)
Cross-reference deployment tools with IaC templates to attribute the change
Use Opus agents to auto-assign the finding based on the environment and resource metadata.

Automation Makes the Difference

No matter how robust your mapping strategy, manual resolution won’t scale.

Opus automates the full stakeholder identification process by combining both strategies above:

Our Organizational Context Agent maps every finding to a known business unit or engineering team.
We parse logs, cloud metadata, and version control to trace resource creation.
When ambiguity arises, Opus falls back to secondary ownership rules and configurable escalation paths.

The result? Findings are assigned to the right person, in the right system, without wasting human cycles on manual research.

From Ownership to Execution

Identifying the right stakeholder is the first step. Opus ensures that what happens next is just as smooth:

Tickets are routed automatically based on policy and priority
SLA tracking and reminders are applied per business unit
Collaboration agents surface contextual guidance directly in tools like Slack or Jira
Security teams maintain full visibility while engineering teams stay in control of their workflows

Conclusion: Remediation Starts With the Right People

Even the best vulnerability intelligence can’t drive results without effective stakeholder engagement.

Security teams need more than insight—they need orchestration.

With Opus, organizations move from fragmented outreach to streamlined assignment. AI agents take on the operational load of identifying, assigning, and following up—so engineers can focus on fixing, not figuring out who should.

→ Learn how Opus automates ownership mapping.

Smarter, Scalable Approach to Cybersecurity Compliance

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