The Hidden Costs of CVEs — And the Value You’re Leaving on the Table

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) are no longer just a background annoyance — they’re a compounding liability. In containerized software environments, CVEs introduce real risk: the threat of breaches, the burden of constant patching, and the opportunity cost of engineering time diverted from innovation. Yet their full impact is still widely underestimated.

Chainguard’s 2025 report, “The Cost of CVEs,” quantifies this toll — revealing just how much organizations are spending to manage vulnerabilities, and how much they stand to gain by solving the problem at its root.

CVEs Cost More Than You Think

From manually building hardened container images to triaging and remediating vulnerabilities, maintaining compliance documentation, and handling customer escalations, engineering teams are spending huge amounts of time on CVE-related tasks that don’t drive business value. These tasks are arduous, and often require high levels of expertise to properly execute. When bandwidth is stretched thin, and the business needs to continue innovating to remain healthy, CVE management becomes a drain on productivity.

Chainguard has worked with a subset of our customers across industries (Consumer & Commerce, Financial Services, Healthcare, Technology, and Telecommunications & Infrastructure) and revenue segments to highlight the business value they stand to gain by using Chainguard Containers. With Chainguard, organizations can outsource tasks like manually building hardened container images, triaging and remediating vulnerabilities, maintaining compliance documentation and handling customer escalations. We have also evaluated the benefits in terms of reduction in risk of a security breach, unlocking revenue from security-conscious customers, and reallocating engineering talent for product development.

A few highlights from the data:

• Organizations across industries saved an average of around $2.1 million annually on CVE remediation, a hard cost savings area that directly unlocks value in other areas of the business.

• Participating companies shared an annual average of over $400,000 in savings on hardening container images, particularly notable in regulated industries like Healthcare and Consumer & Commerce.

• Healthcare organizations can benefit from an average of $50 million in value unlocked annually, with $39 million of that attributed to risk reduction alone.

• Growth-stage startups (with $100M–$500M in revenue) across industries reported average annual returns of $12.6 million, demonstrating that this isn’t just a “big company” problem.

Every participating customer saw direct cost savings from reducing engineering time and effort spent on CVE remediation, maintaining hardened minimal images and handling customer escalations. The most immediate benefit came from reducing the labor required to manage CVEs. When organizations spend less time remediating CVEs and building the necessary infrastructure to do that effectively in-house, they are able to dedicate more time to other important areas of the business, like increasing revenue, speeding innovation, and decreasing the overall risk profile.

The Cost to Do It Yourself

In the report, Chainguard customers reported hard cost savings in four main areas: CVE remediation, image hardening, compliance, and reduced customer escalations. These areas require consistent attention and focus to do well. For many of these organizations, this need led to an immense amount of engineering hours being spent on building or maintaining container images in-house.

For a lot of these engineering teams, this is not an enjoyable exercise. Teams often fall victim to the ”CVE doom cycle”, as countless hours are wasted chasing solutions to triage and remediate vulnerabilities, only to have new ones pop up as time moves forward. The doom cycle is compounded by customers expressing frustration and creating escalations as they notice CVEs popping up in their environment from products and services that they can’t fix on their own. And that doesn’t even take into account the need to reduce CVEs in key compliance frameworks like FedRAMP or PCI-DSS.

All these factors combine to create a frustrating, time-crunched need to complete work that is often not a core part of an engineer’s day-to-day responsibilities. The CVE doom cycle is an expensive problem, and it’s hard and expensive to manage it in-house for many companies. The hard cost savings we quantified in the report show the direct amount of relief these organizations experience when offloading these tasks, and in turn, they unlock significant value in other areas.

Where the Value Comes From

Throughout the report, organizations cited massive increases in the amount of revenue they unlocked by utilizing Chainguard Containers. Reducing the time and effort spent on CVE management allows these organizations to enter new, security-conscious markets, and achieve strict compliance requirements.

Another way these organizations are increasing revenue is through faster innovation. With the time engineering teams are getting back by utilizing Chainguard Containers, they are unlocking millions in potential revenue by building and shipping the solutions their customers need faster. The increased pace of innovation helps these organizations stay at the forefront of their customers’ minds.

Chainguard customers also reported significant return on investment in the area of reduced risk. The cost of a security issue is high, especially in regulated industries like healthcare or financial services. Organizations in these industries possess highly-sensitive customer data, and the resulting payouts and fines from a security breach can be astronomical. Reducing attack surface is key, and reducing the amount of CVEs in an organization’s environment is critical.

One Simple Change, Massive Impact

The underlying issue isn’t just the presence of vulnerabilities — it’s the manual, reactive, and resource-draining way most organizations manage them. Plus, the potential exposure to security incidents.

Chainguard Containers are rebuilt daily from source, hardened to meet standards like FIPS and STIGs, and ship with zero known vulnerabilities. This eliminates entire categories of toil, escalations, and delays, while improving security posture across the board.

The Bottom Line

For too long, CVEs have been treated as a cost of doing business in modern software. But they’re not just a security problem — they’re a business problem. And the solution offers measurable returns across engineering efficiency, market access, and brand trust.

If your organization is spending millions on CVE management — whether visibly through payroll or invisibly through lost opportunities — it’s time to rethink your container strategy.

Read the full report today, and learn more about how Chainguard Containers can help you cut costs, reduce risk, and unlock innovation.