As software supply chains grow more complex, organizations face increasing challenges to manage and secure open source components.
Redundant efforts in identifying vulnerabilities, ensuring compliance, and tracking dependencies often result in inefficiencies and delays.
Software bills of materials (SBOMs) address these challenges by standardizing the way organizations share and exchange data about software components. This improved data sharing fosters collaboration, reduces duplicated work, and streamlines security and compliance processes across teams and organizations.
SBOMs serve as common frameworks to share information about software components and their relationships. By leveraging standardized formats such as SPDX and CycloneDX, SBOMs provide a unified method for representing data, ensuring compatibility and interoperability between tools, teams, and organizations.
Without SBOMs, organizations often duplicate efforts in scanning for vulnerabilities or analyzing compliance risks in open source components.
With SBOMs, organizations can:
More easily share vulnerability and compliance data.
Collaborate across boundaries, ensuring transparency and trust in software ecosystems.
Streamline development processes with standardized, verifiable software metadata.
This level of interoperability simplifies communication across internal teams, external vendors, and global software supply chain partners.
The ability to standardize and share component data enables SBOMs to drive value across a variety of critical use cases:
License compliance: Ensure compliance with open source licenses by maintaining visibility into all software components and their dependencies.
Security monitoring: Continuously monitor components for known vulnerabilities and proactively assess risks.
Export/import controls: Build "denylists" and "allowlists" of components to ensure compliance with regulatory or internal policies.
Mergers and acquisitions: Assess software assets and dependencies for licensing, security, and operational risks during due diligence.
End-of-life planning: Proactively identify alternative components when dependencies approach end-of-life or lose community support.
By addressing these use cases, SBOMs provide software engineering teams with actionable insights to manage risks, ensure compliance, and improve overall software integrity.
Modern software supply chains often span multiple organizations, regions, and industries.
SBOMs help unify these diverse stakeholders by creating a single source of truth for software metadata. With standardized SBOM formats, teams can automate data sharing, streamline workflows, and collaborate more effectively across complex ecosystems.
This improved transparency and efficiency foster greater trust between software producers, vendors, and consumers.
As software supply chains grow in size and complexity, the benefits of improved data sharing through SBOMs will only continue to expand.
With SBOM management and compliance at scale, organizations can save time, reduce redundant work, and enhance collaboration across teams.
To learn more about how SBOMs improve collaboration, security, and visibility across software supply chains, download the full "Innovation Insight for SBOMs" research report from Gartner.
Gartner, Innovation Insight for SBOMs, Manjunath Bhat, Dale Gardner, Mark Horvath, 18 July 2024.
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