Shadow Pricing: the Business Case for Remediation Capacity

One of the most difficult questions facing cybersecurity leaders today is deceptively simple: What do we gain by increasing our remediation capacity?

Every organization is constrained by some combination of remediation bandwidth, operational risk, and competing business demands. Yet the volume of detected vulnerabilities continues to grow, and the pressure to demonstrate progress never subsides. Against this backdrop, CISOs and CIOs are often forced to make difficult trade-offs between investing in more remediation capacity or accepting greater residual risk.

The traditional response to this problem has been to lean on best practices: prioritize critical vulnerabilities, follow vendor guidance, and apply industry benchmarks. But in increasingly complex and resource-constrained environments, best practices are no longer sufficient. They don’t answer the question that security leaders need to ask: what do we gain by increasing our remediation capacity by one more unit? What is the actual value of fixing one more vulnerability?

This is where the concept of shadow pricing comes into play. In optimization theory, a shadow price quantifies the value of relaxing a constraint. In the context of vulnerability management, that constraint is remediation capacity. The shadow price tells us how much additional risk can be eliminated by patching one more vulnerability. This allows us to move beyond static rules and into a mode of dynamic, evidence-based prioritization.

Shadow pricing is especially powerful when applied to EPSS-based remediation strategies. Because EPSS scores are grounded in real-world exploitation likelihood, changes in threshold levels produce measurable changes in both remediation volume and risk reduction. This enables leaders to tie each unit of work to a specific marginal outcome—not just in terms of effort, but in terms of reduced exposure.

When the value of a remediation slot is known, it becomes possible to make smarter investment decisions. If an additional unit of capacity eliminates $800 of expected loss, but costs only $300 to create (whether through automation or staffing), the investment is self-justifying. If that same unit costs $1,200, the opportunity cost may be too high. Shadow pricing provides the missing economic rationale behind vulnerability prioritization decisions.

Crucially, it also aligns security with finance. Security teams can present remediation plans and budget requests not as compliance obligations or staffing needs, but as investment decisions with measurable returns. This reframes the internal conversation: not “we need more people,” but “each additional person removes this much risk, worth this much in avoided loss.”

Perhaps most importantly, shadow pricing gives leaders a way to detect when capacity increases are no longer paying off. As thresholds lower and backlogs grow, the marginal value of additional remediation tends to decrease. At some point, adding more effort yields diminishing returns. Knowing where that point lies allows teams to shift resources away from remediation and into prevention, detection, or resilience without losing control of their risk posture.

The promise of shadow pricing is that it turns resource constraints into strategic levers. It provides a quantitative bridge between risk and capacity, and between security operations and business leadership. By adopting this mindset, CISOs and their teams can move from reactive patching to proactive optimization, making vulnerability management not just more efficient, but more defensible and more aligned with enterprise goals.