Organizations have been forced to learn the hard way over the past year the importance of software supply chain security.
In late 2021, a vulnerability was detected in Log4j, which is a framework for logging in Java that is used as a dependency in over 7,000 open-source projects. This was just one example of a software supply chain security risk that companies have had to pay attention to in recent years.
Managing what’s in your software supply chain is not only important for security purposes, but it can also eliminate technical debt and innovation tax, leading to increased productivity and revenue.
In a recent SD Times Live! event, “Software Supply Chain Hygeine: The Big Picture,” Steve Poole, developer advocate at Sonatype, discussed how to achieve those benefits by investing in software supply chain hygiene.
“There’s no real rocket science here,” said Poole. “If you’re going to produce better quality software, you’ve got to have a better, more secure pipeline. And you’ve got to be serious about this and you’ve got to start looking at the end to end thing.”
What this means, Poole explained, is developers gaining an understanding of how their application fits in the overall pipeline. For example, if they have an API gateway, then they can use tools that monitor the behavior of those.
This understanding requires more collaboration from different groups in the organization, rather than only understanding what their individual part does and viewing the rest as black boxes.
“Once you realize that having a high speed CI/CD system makes you safer, you soon realize that they improve your productivity, because you’ve dealt with all those human parts, right? Once you realize that poor code quality makes you vulnerabl and you start worrying about code quality, and put tools in place for that in all these things, and you improve the communication between your team members, when you finish, what you’ve actually got is a much slicker engine. And it just produces higher quality code faster because you’ve taken out those sort of nasty edges.”
To learn more, catch the replay of “Software Supply Chain Hygiene: The Big Picture,” and join us again on Wednesday, May 18 2022 at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT for another webinar with Sonatype about software supply chain security: “Impact of Zero-Day Attacks on SSC Management.”
