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).