How Security Demands Impact Engineering Time & Solutions
TL;DR
- Security demands consume significant engineering capacity – Teams in high-performance regulated sectors like energy, defense, and manufacturing now lose 25% to 60% of their work week to security-related tasks, far exceeding the 13% industry median.
- SBOM maintenance scales poorly – Manual tracking of software components becomes exponentially complex with multiple hardware targets. Mid-size med-tech and defense firms now allocate specifically for ongoing SBOM and CVE triage.
- Autonomous hardening shifts security from tax to solved problem – Solutions designed for resource-constrained environments can handle continuous hardening and compliance evidence generation. Organizations using security AI and automation save an average of $1.9 million per breach .
- Measurement before automation – Audit your team’s actual time allocation. Organizations are currently spending an average of $28,000 per developer annually just on identifying and addressing security concerns .
- Embedded constraints require embedded-aware solutions – General-purpose security tools fail on resource-constrained devices. A single firmware security scan for a large image can consume a full workday of compute time using standard scanning tools .
Why Security Time Costs Matter Now
Defense and critical infrastructure contracts increasingly mandate continuous compliance verification, not just point-in-time audits.
- Regulatory Escalation: NIS2 now impacts over 300,000 institutions across sectors like energy and manufacturing , demanding an initial incident report or early warning within 24 hours .
- The Cost of Inaction: The average cost for organizations that fail to comply with data protection regulations is $14.82 million, nearly triple the $5.47 million average cost of maintaining active compliance .
- High-Stakes Downtime: In manufacturing, unexpected production stoppages cost an average of £100,000 per hour . In the automotive sector, the cost of software-related line stoppages reaches $22,000 per minute .
Engineering teams absorbing these demands without process changes face a choice: ship late, ship insecure, or burn out. None of these outcomes serve mission-critical systems.
Understanding the Security Time Burden
Direct vs. Indirect Security Costs
Direct costs include hours spent patching vulnerabilities, generating compliance documentation, and responding to security alerts. In highly regulated sectors, documentation and compliance evidence now consume approximately 25% of total development time .
Indirect costs are harder to measure but often larger. The primary culprit is context switching: research shows it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to fully regain focus after a single interruption . For a developer averaging 31 interruptions a day, this results in a cumulative "Focus Tax" of approximately $50,000 per developer annually .
SBOM as Compliance Foundation
A Software Bill of Materials catalogs every component in your software supply chain. Maintaining accurate SBOMs manually requires tracking every library update, transitive dependency, and version change. This becomes exponentially complex in embedded systems with multiple hardware targets. Inadequate SBOM documentation often triggers regulatory feedback that extends product clearance timelines by 3 to 6 months.
OS Hardening Reality
Operating system hardening involves configuring and maintaining security controls at the OS level: disabling unnecessary services, applying security patches, and enforcing access controls. In resource-constrained embedded environments (Cortex-M, RISC-V), this work must balance security against performance and memory limitations.
Time Cost Framework
Security time costs can be distributed across four categories, each with distinct characteristics and automation potential:
- Reactive Work: Responding to discovered vulnerabilities and audit findings. Typical enterprises remediate only 5% of vulnerabilities per month while CVE volumes grow by 25% annually .
- Maintenance Work: Ongoing patching, SBOM updates, and configuration management. Predictable but persistent.
- Compliance Work: Documentation and evidence gathering. Code review time in regulated industries is 60% longer due to these requirements .
- Integration Work: Embedding security into development workflows.
Step-by-Step: Quantifying Your Team’s Security Time Investment
Step 1: Audit Current Time Allocation
Establish baseline visibility into hours of security work actually consumes. Note that application development (coding) accounted for only 16% of a developer's time in 2024, while the rest was consumed by operational tasks . Try to track engineering time across security activities for a minimum of two sprint cycles. Include time spent waiting for security approvals, not just active work.
Step 2: Map Vulnerability Response Workflows
Identify bottlenecks and redundant steps. Document the complete path from vulnerability disclosure to deployed fix. Note where work stalls waiting for human decisions versus automated processes. The AI Paradox shows that while AI speeds up initial coding, 56.4% of developers encounter security issues in AI-generated code, creating new bottlenecks in the review process .
Step 3: Calculate SBOM Maintenance Burden
Count the components in your current SBOMs across all products. Estimate time per component for verification and update tracking. A firmware project with 50 direct dependencies may have 500+ transitive dependencies requiring tracking. Manual SBOM maintenance is described as tedious, prone to error, and unable to keep up with short development cycles .
Step 4: Assess OS Hardening Overhead
Understand the time investment in secure operating system configurations across your device fleet. Calculate time spent reconciling security requirements with resource constraints on embedded targets. Annual maintenance for systems typically amounts to 15–25% of initial development costs to keep them secure and compliant .
Step 5: Evaluate Autonomous Hardening Alternatives
Determine whether autonomous OS and SBOM hardening can meaningfully reduce your measured time costs. Focus on solutions designed for resource-constrained environments. Unified cyber defense platforms have delivered an in the first year with a payback period of just 1.6 months .
Step 6: Demonstrate Recovered Engineering Capacity
Deploy autonomous hardening with clear metrics to validate time recovery. Start with a single product line or device family. Managed services and automation typically show 15–25% productivity improvements as internal teams refocus on strategic innovation .
Common Mistakes and Pitfalls
- Underestimating context-switching costs: A 30-minute security task that interrupts deep development work costs far more than 30 minutes. Developers often need 30-60 minutes to return to their previous level of productivity after high-cost switches .
- Shadow AI risks: Adopting AI assistants without oversight adds an average of $670,000 to the price tag of a data breach .
- Ignoring tool sprawl: The average employee moves between apps nearly 1,200 times every day, costing teams up to 9% of their annual capacity .
What to Do Next?
Start with Step 1: a two-sprint audit of your team’s actual security time allocation. If your audit reveals that hours security work and fixes consume more than 15% of engineering capacity, autonomous OS and SBOM hardening warrants serious evaluation. Reclaiming even 10% of lost bandwidth can recover millions in productive value and meet the sub-24-hour reporting thresholds required by modern standards like NIS2 .
Frequently Asked Questions
How many hours per week do engineering teams typically spend on security work?
In high-compliance sectors like defense and energy, engineers spend between 25% and 60% of their work week on security-related activities.
What makes SBOM maintenance so time-consuming for embedded systems?
Embedded systems target multiple hardware architectures (Cortex-M, RISC-V) with separate SBOM tracking. Transitive dependencies multiply component count, and resource constraints mean every dependency decision requires security, compatibility, and resource trade-off analysis. Coverage and accuracy of the SBOM is also very disparate, often teams are using multiple tools to solve this one requirement.
Can autonomous hardening solutions work on resource-constrained devices?
Yes, but look for lightweight, architecture-agnostic agents. Standard firmware scanning tools often take a full workday of compute time for a single image, which is unacceptable for agile cycles .
What is the ROI of security automation?
Organizations using security AI and automation save an average of $1.9 million per breach and shorten breach containment times by 80 days .
