As organizations become more dependent on software applications, the complexity of software supply chains is rapidly increasing. These software supply chains are a complex web of third-party components, transitive dependencies, and open-source tools and face different cybersecurity challenges. Ensuring integrity and trust in software development maintains software products’ integrity and reliability.
While software applications accelerate development and reduce business costs, they also introduce significant vulnerabilities. For any organization’s success, it is important to plug the gaps and manage that risk effectively, which is critical to your success. Implementing an active application security posture management as a foundational aspect of application security management can significantly improve operational efficiency and risk posture.
This blog will explore the role of automation in software supply chain security and how your organization can get started with it. Continue reading to find out!
The Role of Automation in Mitigating Software Supply Chain Attacks
Automation can significantly strengthen your software supply chain and security posture with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), data analytics, ensuring consistent software development life cycle protection.
Automated supply chain security tools analyze your software bill of materials (SBOM) after ingestion. Open-source and third-party components, licenses for each element, versions of each element, dependencies, artifacts, patch status of each component, and scripts are all verified. These tools continuously check for new vulnerability threats so that when a new danger emerges, they can scan your network for impacted components, providing a clear picture of the vulnerabilities based on your business context and risk score. Such monitoring gives you unparalleled visibility into dependencies, pinpointing vulnerabilities commonly introduced by third-party software, open-source libraries, and even insecure CI/CD pipelines.
Security Orchestration and Consolidation
An automated software supply chain security provides a central location where you can manage findings, orchestrate activities, prevent risks, and maintain software pipeline integrity. It ensures that all data and conclusions are consistent, up-to-date, and reliable. The platform provides auto-discovery and mapping of all applications with complete visibility over the software supply chain attack surface, empowering operations and business risk assessments.
No-Code Workflow Automation
DevOps and DevSecOps teams can quickly create customizable response plans from an intuitive drag-and-drop interface for improved remediation assistance using a supply chain security system. No-code workflow automation assists container coverage, simplifies the creation of tailored workflows, automates ticketing and notifications, and enforces granular policies to prevent security issues from reaching production.
Maturity Assessment & Compliance
Effectively evaluate your security practices and monitor, report on, and improve organizational compliance for frameworks such as NIST, SOC2, and PCI-DSS. The application security posture management system shows compliance violations for security issues before deployment, creating a compliance issue.
Benefits of Automated Software Supply Chain Security
By embedding automated security into the organizational culture, companies can better protect their software supply chains and minimize risks to their financial and reputational assets. It generates tickets for these issues, facilitating a rapid and efficient response to mitigate damage, safeguarding your software, and ensuring your security and development teams are immediately alerted to potential security incidents. Security teams get instant notifications whenever a vulnerability, suspicious code change, or unusual activity pops up in your development environment.
Businesses benefit from HCL AppScan in the following ways:
- Risk prioritization is based on active context, including exploitability, reachability, and business criticality.
- Automates continuous scanning and response to improve workflows, reduce tool dependency, and provide actionable insights.
- It offers a pipeline bill of materials (PBOM) for continuous visibility from code to cloud and traceability from cloud to code.
- Its no-code workflow automation can also be customized based on the security teams’ response and remediation protocols.
- Accurately test source code, open-source components, web applications, secrets, and APIs with SAST, DAST, and SCA and manage all findings in centralized dashboards for faster triage and remediation.
How To Get Started With Automated Software Supply Chain System?
An automated supply chain security system is a modern, centralized platform that integrates best-in-class application security testing with robust posture management and software supply chain security. It seamlessly integrates with the SDLC and all critical components, including PBOM technology.
Enterprises must select automation tools and vendors that align with enterprise security requirements, scalability needs, and integration capabilities. It determines if an ASPM solution provided is viable before full-scale deployment and manages potential risks associated with a project. Also, ensure employee training and cultural change management to adopt automation tools within the organization successfully. Employees proficient with software tools can use them to their full potential and bring optimal efficiency.
For any assistance, check the application security demo. Our proven expertise in managing automated software supply chains based on a robust suite of services will greatly help.
Conclusion
As the dependence on complex software supply chains grows, so does the need for a comprehensive and proactive approach to cybersecurity. Businesses should foster a culture of proactive application security management systems within an organization, promoting shared responsibility among all stakeholders and committing to continuous improvement.
Automated software supply chain security systems give you full visibility into the risk factors and in-depth assessment tools that let you test, triage, and remediate vulnerabilities in record time. It automatically correlates alerts with business context and threat intelligence so your organization can focus on the most critical issues first.
Muninder Adavelli is a core team member and Digital Growth Strategist at Techjury. With a strong background in marketing and a deep understanding of technology's role in digital marketing, he brings immense value to the TechJury team.