In traditional DevOps models, security is often perceived as a “tax” on innovation. It is often seen as a necessary friction that slows down release cycles with endless lists of vulnerabilities. For the CTO, speed is currency. For the CISO, risk is the enemy.. 

But what if security wasn’t a gate, but a catalyst?

The modern Cloud-Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP) is driving a fundamental shift. It moves away from the legacy model of “find everything, fix nothing” to a precision-based approach: Prioritized Action.

By adopting a three-stage workflow (Unified Context, Dynamic Scoring, and Focused Action) with Orca, organizations are proving that high-velocity engineering and robust security are not mutually exclusive. They are, in fact, force multipliers for each other.

Here is how this model works as a business enabler.

The Foundation: Unified Context (Visibility at the Speed of Cloud)

An organization’s cloud environment is often ever-changing and through its effort to provide a seamless experience for developers to spin up new workloads, it is often a nightmare to enforce proper security guardrails. Because of this, traditional agent-based tools cannot keep up. Traditional security tools require engineers to install and maintain agents on every VM. This is a massive operational burden that kills “Time-to-Value.”

The Agentless Advantage: Leading organizations are using Orca’s SideScanning™, an agentless architecture that snapshots cloud block storage to provide 100% visibility without touching the workload.

  • The Velocity Impact: When Paidy, a fintech unicorn, adopted this architecture, they connected 12 AWS accounts and achieved full visibility in under 30 minutes.
  • The Engineering Win: This approach eliminates the “deployment drag” of managing agents. Paidy estimated they saved $500,000 annually and the effort of 2 Full-Time Engineers. These were resources that could be “repatriated” back to core product development.

“After years of dealing with agents… I knew that its agentless approach was both a major innovation and a game changer. We don’t have the time and resources to orchestrate a tool… We want to use a service that doesn’t require any agent.” 

Jeremy Turner, Senior Cloud Security Engineer, Paidy

Key Takeaway: When security requires zero integration effort, new features can spin up more frequently without waiting for “security approval.”

“So What?”: Dynamic Risk Scoring (Killing the Noise)

The fastest way to lose developer trust is to cry wolf. If you send an engineering lead a spreadsheet of 10,000 “Critical” CVEs, they will ignore you. Why? Because a vulnerability on a stopped, private server does not carry the same business risk as one on a public-facing payment gateway.

Context is King: We need to move beyond static CVSS scores to Dynamic Risk Scoring. This score (typically 0-10) is a more accurate representation of the true risk a vulnerability poses based on the broad context Orca can provide.

  • The Velocity Impact: Lemonade, the digital insurance innovator, used this contextual approach to cut their actionable alerts down to one-sixth of the original volume. 
  • The Productivity Boost: By filtering out the noise (unreachable or ineffective risks), developers stop wasting cycles on irrelevant patches. They focus only on the issues that actually threaten the business.

“This puts problems into small bites we can chew through… instead of being overwhelmed.” 

Jonathan Jaffe, CISO, Lemonade

“Now What?”: Conceptualizing Strategic Remediation

Once you have trusted data and accurate risk scores, the way you manage remediation changes completely. You move from a reactive “whac-a-mole” strategy to a strategic, value-driven approach.

Strategic Remediation vs. Ticket Flooding: Risk-based prioritization allows you to group issues by their nature rather than their volume. This changes the conversation from “How many tickets do we have?” to “What is our strategy for this risk?”

  • The “Critical Few” (Immediate Response): When the system identifies a Critical Alert, the path forward is clear. These are not just tickets; they are a contextualized indication of real threats. Because the noise has been filtered out, these alerts are rare and trusted. Teams can work quickly to investigate and fix them because they know it matters, dramatically lowering Mean Time to Remediation (MTTR).
  • The “Campaign” Approach (Planned Work): For high-priority but not immediately critical issues, we shift from ad-hoc ticketing to “Security Campaigns.” Instead of pestering developers daily, security leaders can create a focused initiative. For example, “Remove all unused IAM keys in the next sprint.” This respects the agile planning process and treats security improvement as a feature, not a bug.
  • Managing Security Debt (Long-term Hygiene): Low-risk issues (like vulnerabilities on internal, non-privileged machines) no longer clutter the immediate backlog. They are tracked as “Security Debt.” This acknowledges that not every risk needs to be fixed today, allowing engineering leadership to prioritize innovation while maintaining visibility on the long-term posture.
  • Closing the Loop: Continuous AppSec & Proactive Monitoring: Velocity isn’t just about fixing things fast; it’s about not having to fix them twice. By integrating continuous AppSec monitoring, we can trace risks detected in production back to the source code or container definition. This moves the organization from reactive patching to proactive remediation. We fix the root cause in the build pipeline, ensuring that the vulnerability doesn’t “respawn” in the next deployment. This creates a self-healing cycle that gets faster and cleaner with every release.

The Bottom Line

This workflow rebuilds the bridge between Security and Engineering. When developers know that an alert is contextual and prioritized, they stop viewing security as a blocker and start treating it as a guardrail.

By removing the friction and the noise, teams can secure the cloud and accelerate the business.