Jira is a project management tool that helps teams track, organise and prioritize work. In security operations (SecOps), Jira can manage incidents, and vulnerabilities and coordinate security tasks with clarity and accountability. Its flexibility, integration capabilities and automation features make it ideal for tracking security issues from detection to resolution. Many security teams are drawn to Jira because it’s easy to adopt and can be scaled quickly across teams while supporting compliance through audit-grade tracking.

However, Jira’s real strength lies in its ability, when properly configured and supported by solid processes, to unify multiple security workflows into one remediation channel. Despite this, implementing Jira for SecOps can quickly become overwhelming. Typical challenges include adapting Jira to overcomplicated workflows with no clear ownership, executing complex integrations with security tools without proper phasing and missing alignment between Jira implementations and the underlying processes. A major pitfall is aiming for perfection: building overly complex setups that are hard to maintain and slow to deliver value. Simplicity often beats sophistication, especially early in the adoption journey.

Fortunately, there are three easy ways to get started with Jira for SecOps that reduce implementation complexity and strike the right balance between simplicity and operational impact. First, even before touching Jira, define a single security ticket resolution process that all stakeholders in your company can accept. This becomes the foundation for handling issues from any security workflow and building consensus around a single, extensible resolution process.

Second, build a Jira reporting pipeline for development teams to receive, track and resolve security issues coming from vulnerability scans and pentests through that same process. Third, use Jira as the company’s primary incident reporting channel to centralize response efforts and improve visibility. Together, these steps create a scalable, lean system that gets you going without leading to a complicated rollout.

Defining a single security ticket resolution process for Jira

Establishing a single resolution process for handling security tickets in Jira is essential for consistency, ownership and - ultimately - scalability. Defining and implementing this process creates the foundation to support current and future resolution activities, ensuring the approach is extensible as the organization grows.

The process should have two goals: first, efficient and rapid distribution of security tasks to the respective application or code owners, i.e. those best positioned to understand and fix issues quickly. Second, reduce confusion and enforce ownership clarity. However, to be successfully implemented, the process must be built on stakeholder consensus and go through a formal feedback and approval cycle to ensure alignment, buy-in, and long-term success.

Change for change’s sake rarely works. Unregulated, unagreed, and unplanned changes often feel forced, creating resistance and slowing progress. To maximise the chances of success, the security team must introduce the security ticket resolution process collaboratively. The most effective way to do this is through Request for Change (RFC) documents.

An RFC is a lightweight change proposal that outlines the problem, solution, rationale, and potential impact, creating a clear path for feedback and refinement. Engineering teams value RFCs because they provide structure, transparency, and a collaborative approach to reaching consensus. By using RFCs, security teams avoid the pitfalls of using top-down directives. Instead, changes are proposed and shaped openly, making it easier for teams to align on the what and the how of implementation. RFCs can be used to initiate changes in both processes and tooling; what matters is following a good structure that shows care:

During implementation, another common pitfall is to fail to get meaningful input on an RFC. To do so, the RFC must be distributed to the right audience: those with the expertise and context to provide relevant feedback. Reviewers should be given a clear deadline to respond, ensuring timely progress.

Additionally, RFCs should be hosted on collaborative platforms like Google Docs, Word Online, or Confluence, allowing asynchronous commenting and discussion. This way everybody can provide input, without necessarily having to participate in decision-making meetings. Finally, the RFC should outline how feedback will be reviewed and how the final decision will be made, ensuring clarity on how consensus will be reached.

Process fundamentals

Looking at the resolution process, several fundamentals must be followed. As mentioned, for the process to be effective, it must be based on a single, unified workflow for triaging and resolving security issues. Multiple, fragmented processes must be avoided. While inputs can come from various sources like vulnerability management tools, penetration tests, or bug bounty reports, the resolution must follow a standardised method.

A standardised resolution ensures all issues are handled consistently, tracked uniformly and resolved in line with Service Level Agreements (SLAs). These SLAs, formalized through the RFC process, should provide clear remediation timelines, defined in hours, days or weeks as needed. Finally, the resolution process should define accountability expectations across teams.

The process must also follow two clear phases. First, ticket triaging by a triage committee. This committee must comprise members from various development and application teams working with security engineers. Triage committees must be rotated using an on-duty system to monitor and manage the backlog of security issues in Jira. The committee must track incoming security issues and assign them to the appropriate teams for remediation. To support this, issues must be reported via dedicated, easily accessible channels such as mailing lists, Slack, or Teams. During triage, SLAs must be applied based on issue severity to ensure timely acknowledgement and assignment.

As part of the security issue resolution process, the triage committee should be allowed to request risk acceptances for specific tickets. In such cases, the committee must provide a clear justification to the security team (or CISO), who will be responsible for reviewing and officially closing tickets as risk accepted. This typically applies when other mitigating security controls are already in place, or when the reported vulnerability poses low risk and the remediation effort is disproportionately high.

The second phase of the process must focus on delivering fixes. All security tickets must have a responsible developer assigned to enable proper triage and routing, and a Severity level must be set to indicate urgency and apply relevant SLAs. Severity levels must be based on CVSS score data from vulnerability scanners or pentest reports. If none are available, CVSS rubrics should be used, or a default severity should be applied.

Due dates must always be set based on severity so resolution timeframes may be automatically applied. Tickets must be assigned by analyzing the underlying issues and determining the affected feature or application. The assigned developer may perform final validation and reassign it to the triage committee if more information is needed. Once accepted, the developer must work with the Product Manager to prioritize the fix.

Building a Jira security issue reporting pipeline

Once a single resolution process is defined, it must be implemented in Jira. A common mistake is failing to set up a unified Jira pipeline for security issues. Once remediation commences, the pipeline may handover tickets to separate Jira projects beloging to individual application teams, but never before. However, if this happens, ticket statuses must always by communicated back to the single remediation pipeline.

Always start by integrating issues from vulnerability management tools and pentest reports. These sources are ideal entry points because they have a clear source of origin (i.e. a tool or a report) and naturally align with a prioritised funnel-like remediation workflow. By contrast, inputs from sources like Cyber Threat Intelligence are harder to collect, less structured and require more thoughtful processing. Moreover, most modern enterprise IT platforms offer built-in vulnerability management capabilities, making this integration the easiest to tackle first.

A SaaS company can equally start feeding its unified security resolution pipeline with data from key vulnerability management tools tied to its products. This includes SAST tools like Snyk or SonarCloud for identifying source code vulnerabilities and dependency analysis tools like GitHub Dependabot for tracking issues in third-party libraries. Public web assets can be monitored using perimeter scanners such as Detectify. Infrastructure-level vulnerabilities (across cloud, servers, or Kubernetes) can be detected using tools like Qualys, Tenable or ARMOsec.

On the pentesting side, the same Jira pipeline can process and track findings efficiently. By logging pentest issues directly into the same pipeline, security teams ensure the same clear ownership, prioritization and visibility. Moreover, Jira can be integrated with Confluence to centralize pentest reports and maintain a clear audit trail.

Building on this, an agentic AI approach can automate the extraction and submission of findings from pentest reports. AI agents can read PDF or Markdown reports, identify relevant vulnerabilities, and map them to structured Jira tickets with the correct severity, impacted assets and remediation guidance. AI agents can remove manual overhead and deliver pentest insights into the pipeline within minutes; turning static reports into immediate, actionable work.

For simplicity and consistency, the Jira pipeline should use a single issue type named Security Issue configured with its own set of custom properties. A standardized issue type enables clear field mapping for AI-driven automation, simplifies bulk processing of vulnerabilities, and ensures consistent metadata such as severity, affected asset, and source. It also improves filtering, reporting, and dashboarding, giving security teams better visibility on remediation efforts over time.

From an output perspective, a unified Jira SecOps pipeline provides value-add on two fronts. First, it allows the security team to build and maintain a unified inventory of risk exceptions, reducing noise and preventing development teams from wasting time on low-impact or irrelevant security issues.

Secondly, it accelerated the creation of clear, actionable KPIs and SLAs. The most impactful KPI is the percentage of security tickets resolved on time, which tracks how well teams meet the SLA targets defined in the resolution process. When this metric is mapped over a 6-month rolling window, it shows whether the organization is improving or declining in remediating security issues. This KPI is easy for management to understand, fits neatly into dashboards and can be used in ISO 27001 management review meetings to measure security remediation performance across teams.

On the pentest side, the unified pipeline enables the creation of targeted metrics that track remediation performance with precision. Key metrics include: time to triage, which measures how quickly findings are acknowledged and routed; time to fix, showing how long it takes to resolve issues once triaged; and percentage of findings remediated, offering a clear view of closure rates. Additional metrics like time to close by severity help prioritize efforts, while the percentage of findings accepted as risk brings visibility into decisions that bypass fixes. These metrics offer security teams and stakeholders a clear, data-driven view of how effectively pentest findings are being addressed.

By pairing the Jira SecOps pipeline with Confluence, teams can create real-time reports that track the distribution of findings by pentest and show the resolution status for each pentest project. This provides an overview of how many issues were identified, resolved or are still pending, all organized by individual pentest:

Using Jira as a company incident reporting channel

Another great way to start using Jira for SecOps is to make it the company’s main incident reporting channel. This can be done by setting up a dedicated email address - like incidents[@]company.com - that automatically feeds into a Jira workflow, notifies the security team and creates incident tickets for follow-up.

This brings several advantages: first, it gives employees a single, clear place to report incidents. It solves a common pain point where staff are unsure how or where to raise security concerns. A single mailing address can be easily promoted across townhalls, newsletters, and presentations. Second, the security team gains a valuable stream of data, capturing patterns in incidents (such as repeated phishing attempts) and can use Jira automation to track trends over a 12-month rolling window. This turns the reporting channel into a meaningful source of insight to feed back into awareness campaigns.

There are multiple options to set up such a workflow: you can use a Jira-managed email address (provided by Atlassian), connect a custom email account via IMAP or POP, or forward emails from an existing mailbox into Jira. Jira automatically converts the email subject into the issue summary and the email body into the ticket description. It can also handle attachments, inline images, and HTML formatting, ensuring rich context is preserved. Replies to the original email thread are also logged as comments in the ticket.

Jira’s native email ingestion isn’t the only option: Zapier also offers a flexible alternative for creating Jira tickets from email. With Zapier, you can build custom automations (Zaps) that trigger when new emails arrive in services like Gmail or Zapier’s own Email Parser. These Zaps can then create new Jira issues, map specific email fields to Jira fields (like subject to summary, body to description), and assign additional metadata such as labels, priority, or assignee.

This method is useful when more advanced parsing is needed, such as extracting specific text or structured data from emails. Zapier also supports conditional logic, letting you route different types of emails to different Jira projects or issue types. This approach gives you more control over customization without needing native Jira admin rights.

Since the Jira channel for reporting incidents will handle confidential information, it should be restricted to the security team only. This means configuring the workflow within a private Jira project, with access granted exclusively to approved security team members. Jira allows you to tightly control access through project permission schemes, where you can define who can browse, create, comment on, or transition issues. Access can be limited by assigning roles or specific user groups to each permission.

The same level of control must apply to connected channels. For instance, if Slack is used to notify the security team when new tickets are created, the channel must also be private to avoid unintentional exposure of sensitive information.

To ensure resilience, a secondary incident reporting channel should be made available to employees and clearly communicated. This can include a secondary Slack or Teams channel or even a phone number. For ISO 27001 compliance, it’s essential to demonstrate both a primary and secondary reporting mechanism. If the secondary channel is public (e.g. a shared chat room), employees must be explicitly instructed to avoid sharing sensitive or confidential information and instead provide minimal context.

The incident reporting channel should also be shared with customers, ideally via the company website or a Trust Center. Alternatively, your security team could publish the incident reporting email via a security.txt file placed at /.well-known/security.txt on your public website. This simple, standardized text file makes it easy for security researchers to find the right contact for reporting vulnerabilities. It would also signal your company’s commitment to responsible disclosure.

Finally, dedicated security SLAs can be created to measure performance over the Jira incident reporting workflow. Jira’s built-in tracking of ticket transition states allows teams to monitor how quickly incidents are acknowledged and resolved. Two key metrics to track are: the first (and simplest) is the number of security incident tickets raised monthly over a 12-month rolling basis.

The second is the average ticket acknowledgement time. By convention, this should be measured in hours from ticket creation to when it’s moved to “In Progress.” Additionally, tickets should be consistently tagged by incident type (e.g. spam, phishing, spear-phishing, insider threat), allowing your team to collect actionable metadata and surface trends to management over time.

Conclusion

Implementing Jira for security operations doesn’t require perfection; just a strong foundation. By focusing on a unified resolution process, a centralized reporting pipeline and a clear incident intake channel, security teams can build a lean, scalable system that delivers real impact without unnecessary complexity. The key is to start simple, drive alignment through collaboration, and grow iteratively with the right metrics. The three ways outlined in this blog post offer an easy method to kick-start a Jira SecOps journey that will sustain your operations for the long term.