Open source code is everywhere, and it needs to be managed to mitigate security risks. Developers are tasked with creating engaging and reliable applications faster than ever. To achieve this, they rely heavily on open source code to quickly add functionality to their proprietary software. With open source code making up an estimated 60-80% of proprietary applications’ code bases, managing it has become critical to reducing an organization’s security risk.

Protecting the software supply chain is now a major organizational priority. Two weapons in the arsenal to help protect against data breaches and digital attacks are software supply chain security and software composition analysis (SCA). Here’s a look at Software Supply Chain Security vs SCA. The world today runs on software and ensuring it is reliable and secure can be a dicey proposition.

Developers spend over a third of their time fixing bad code and reducing technical debt. Detecting and fixing errors in production is not only more costly than doing so during development but also slows down innovation and has a negative impact on productivity, the development experience, and team morale. Having tools that help catch and fix coding mistakes earlier in the development process creates a better experience and increased productivity.

With a surplus of software security testing solutions on the market, identifying the right SCA solution has never been more important. In today’s world, there is an increasingly large number of software security tools and testing solutions available with a range of capabilities, including software composition analysis (SCA), for managing open source risks.

The software development landscape moves quickly. As organizations seek to innovate at increasing speed, developers find ways to develop and deploy digital apps faster. More than 500 million cloud-native digital apps and services are being deployed this year–the same number of apps developed over the last 40 years! Against this backdrop, ensuring software code security and quality has become more critical–and challenging.

In the continuous delivery (CI)/continuous delivery (CD) pipeline, one of the key ingredients to add to the pot is software composition analysis (SCA), an automated process that identifies the open source software in a codebase. We know that app development teams are under pressure to deliver releases with new features and fix bugs as quickly as possible–and before the competition does. Increasingly, they rely on CI/CD to build, test, and quickly add small updates.

What’s the difference between an SBOM verse SCA tools? Allow us to explain. Software bill of materials (SBOMs) have been garnering a lot of attention as of late, especially since the 2021 Biden Administration executive order mandating that organizations doing business with the government provide a detailed inventory of all components that make up an application to improve cybersecurity.