How Cathay Reduced Security Fix Time by 63% with GitHub Copilot and Advanced Security

Cathay operates one of Asia’s most recognized airlines, connecting more than 100 destinations with a workforce of over 30,000 people. Its software systems underpin critical operations — from flight management and crew scheduling to customer-facing booking and loyalty platforms. The stakes of a failed deployment or unpatched vulnerability are not abstract: they affect passengers, crew, and revenue in real time.

Before the transformation, the engineering organization faced compounding friction. Toolchains were fragmented and outdated, workflows were manual and error-prone, and security vulnerabilities were typically caught late in the development cycle — after code had been written, reviewed, and staged. Late-stage security fixes are expensive: they require rework, delay releases, and create handoffs between teams that slow everything down. Developer sentiment reflected the frustration, and the gap between the engineering team’s capabilities and the pace the business needed was widening.

Cathay adopted GitHub as its end-to-end development platform, consolidating code hosting, CI/CD, security, and AI into a single environment. GitHub Copilot was rolled out to more than 1,000 developers in under a week — a deployment pace that itself signals the quality of the onboarding experience. Developers began using Copilot for code completion and increasingly adopted agent mode, which handles multi-step tasks across the codebase. GitHub Advanced Security was embedded directly into developer workflows, enabling real-time code scanning and secret detection that catch issues before they reach review. Copilot Autofix surfaces suggested secure code changes inline without interrupting developer flow.

The measurable outcomes were significant. Tech debt fixes improved by 40% year-over-year. Mean time to remediate security vulnerabilities fell by 63%. Developers accepted more than four million lines of Copilot-suggested code, and developer satisfaction scores reached 4.4 out of 5. Rajeev Nair, General Manager of IT Infrastructure and Security at Cathay, described Copilot as a collaborative partner rather than a tool, noting that the cultural shift — developers taking ownership of security rather than treating it as a handoff — was as significant as the technical improvements.

For Cathay, the goal now is scaling these DevSecOps practices across the organization and using the unified GitHub platform as the foundation for continued innovation in aviation software. In an industry defined by regulatory complexity, safety requirements, and constantly shifting operational conditions, having engineering infrastructure that can adapt quickly without sacrificing security is not a productivity benefit — it is a competitive necessity.