For PHP, you'd want to use IUS instead: https://dl.iuscommunity.org/pub/ius/stable/CentOS/7/x86_64/r...

Source repo: https://github.com/iuscommunity-pkg/php71u

For security reasons, I'm directly building the packages from Git. Works like a charm, and I don't have to include many different third party repos or introduce additional security dependencies.

Generally, Red Hat backports security fixes without incrementing the version number (though that doesn't seem to be the case here).