We’re thrilled to announce that Snyk was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Software Composition Analysis (SCA), Q2 2023 report! We believe this recognition — and the fact that we are ranked highest in the Strategy category out of all evaluated vendors — highlights the work we’ve done at Snyk to disrupt the industry with developer-centric application security solutions to help companies secure their software supply chain.

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.

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.

Software composition analysis is an essential part of application security. Here are the important factors to consider when selecting an SCA scanner to be sure it is well-suited to your needs.

Open source software adoption reaches higher levels every year. Recent figures show that over 70% of code used in codebases is open source. With a constant stream of new components comes increased requirements to manage the inherent risks associated with open source. Requirements that quickly turn into a necessity as supply chain attacks increased by 400% in 2021. The practice to identify and track open source components usually falls under the umbrella of Software Composition Analysis (SCA).