Knowing Your Software Supply Chain

About the Presentation: Every software development organization on the planet has a software supply chain that is consuming a massive volume of open source and third-party components at extremely high velocity. To provide a much clearer perspective to this volume and velocity, we can see that a global population more than 11 million developers consumed over 20 billion components in 2014.

Those in AppSec who have pursued improved visibility, supplier choices, and control mechanisms across their software supply chains have boosted developer productivity by 15% - 40%, crumbled mountains of security debt, and shifted millions of dollars from sustaining operations to accelerating innovation.

Yet the vast majority of organizations developing software are blind to their free-for-all consumption volume, patterns, and velocity. Their software supply chain practices are silently sabotaging efforts to accelerate development, improve efficiency and maintain the integrity of their applications.

In June, we authored the 2015 State of the Software Supply Chain Report. It is a quantitative analysis of more than 106,000 software development organizations consuming billions of open source and third-party software components from over 100,000 “suppliers” (open source projects).

While the average organization in the study consumed 240,000 open source and third party software components in 2014, the study revealed:

• An average of 15,337 (7.5%) components consumed included known security flaws, impacting the integrity of operations

• 75% of organizations lack policies that control the use of open source and third-party components that are making their way through their software supply chains and into production

• An average application has 24 known critical or severe open source security flaws, electively built in by the development team

But this discussion is not intended to simply shed light on bad practices, it is about learning. Attendees will gain new visibility as to what’s happening in their own software supply chains, how to avoid these elective risks, and how leading technology, banking, and government organizations are applying proven supply chain principles from other industries toward improving their AppSec practices.

About the Presenter: Dave Hale has been an Agile evangelist and coach since the early 2000’s and has helped many organizations with their Agile transformations.  In the local STL market these include, Express Scripts, Scottrade & MasterCard. Since joining Sonatype, Dave is now focusing his Agile experience onto the Software Supply Chain, DevOps and Application security.

Chip Digirolamo has been selling software development tools for 16 years at Rational, IBM, Rally and now Sonatype. His passion for process improvement and waste reduction brought me to Sonatype. Component driven development has pushed software development even closer to traditional manufacturing and much like Lean and Agile, Software Supply Chain Management is emerging as the next behavior that software development is borrowing from the manufacturing world. At Sonatype we utilize our Nexus Platform to facilitate key Supply Chain Principles bringing efficiencies and security to the application manufacturing process.