Webinar
OSS Management Use Cases for Software Supply Chain Security
Learn key OSS management use cases, SBOM best practices, and security workflows to strengthen your software supply chain and meet rising compliance demands.
Original Air Date: October 25, 2024
Overview
Unlock the clarity and confidence you need to strengthen your software supply chain in an era of accelerating risk, regulation, and complexity. This webinar dives deep into how modern software producers can take control of open source usage, vulnerability exposure, and licensing obligations—before they become costly bottlenecks. You’ll see exactly how a well‑structured SBOM strategy, paired with automated SCA workflows, improves visibility across every phase of development and delivery.
The session breaks down real‑world use cases that show how teams can shift left, streamline compliance, and reduce friction with customers who increasingly demand transparency. You’ll also discover how to operationalize vulnerability assessments and create actionable VEX reports that focus your teams on what truly matters. Beyond security, the webinar highlights how to eliminate legal surprises, simplify third‑party notices, and ensure your products stay shippable—release after release. Whether you’re automating CI/CD pipelines, maturing your open source policy, or preparing for industry and regulatory requirements, this session gives you a practical blueprint to elevate your entire software production process.
Recap
Key Themes and Takeaways
The Evolving Landscape of Open Source and Supply Chain Risk
The webinar opens by grounding viewers in the accelerating scale and complexity of open source adoption, highlighting how rapidly rising dependency counts and sophisticated threat actors have reshaped software risk. It emphasizes that modern attacks—especially supply chain intrusions—are no longer isolated or opportunistic, requiring organizations to adopt new levels of rigor in how they track and validate every component used within their applications.
Understanding the Core Role of SCA in Application Security
To help software teams navigate this environment, the session walks through the three essential pillars of application security testing—static analysis, dynamic analysis, and software composition analysis—and explains why SCA has become indispensable. The discussion breaks down how SCA uniquely identifies risk introduced through third‑party and open source components, providing visibility that traditional testing simply cannot deliver.
Building Accurate and Actionable SBOMs
A major theme centers on Software Bills of Materials (SBOMs) as a foundational requirement for transparency, customer trust, and regulatory compliance. The webinar details what information an SBOM should contain, how it acts like an ingredient list for your application, and why it must remain separate from real‑time vulnerability data. Attendees gain clarity on how SBOMs support risk mitigation by enabling teams, customers, and partners to understand precisely what’s inside their software.
Using VEX Reports to Prioritize and Communicate Vulnerability Impact
Beyond creating SBOMs, the webinar explores how VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) reports help teams distinguish between vulnerabilities that matter and those that do not. Viewers learn how VEX reports reduce noise by annotating the exploitability of vulnerabilities based on how an application actually uses a component. This ensures customers receive more accurate, contextual, and actionable security information.
Key SCA Use Cases That Drive Real Business Value
The session outlines four primary use cases: inbound assessments for evaluating external code, internal shift‑left compliance checks, industry and customer‑driven transparency requirements, and reactive incident response. Each use case shows how proactive analysis can prevent costly rework, accelerate sales cycles, and reduce legal and operational risk—offering a comprehensive lens into how SCA fits across a product’s lifecycle.
Empowering Developers Through IDE and CI/CD Automation
The webinar demonstrates how integrating SCA into development environments gives engineers instant insight into risky dependencies without breaking their workflow. It also illustrates how automated CI/CD scanning reinforces continuous compliance, generates immediate build‑level intelligence, and seamlessly feeds issues back into engineering backlogs—supporting rapid iteration without sacrificing security or legal safeguards.
Automating Compliance Through Third‑Party Notices and License Management
A significant portion of the conversation highlights the often‑overlooked importance of license compliance and third‑party notices. The webinar shows how automating notices generation and resolving license conflicts dramatically reduces manual effort, eliminates release delays, and prevents legal surprises. This automation ensures accurate attribution while aligning with corporate policy and industry expectations.
Conducting Deep Security Analysis and Managing Vulnerability Lifecycles
Attendees gain a detailed look at how comprehensive vulnerability data from multiple sources is consolidated, analyzed, and assessed for severity, reachability, and actionability. The session also demonstrates how teams can classify vulnerabilities, set policy rules, suppress false positives, and document remediation decisions—ultimately enabling smarter prioritization and more informed stakeholder communication.
Leveraging Impact Analysis for Rapid Incident Response
The webinar concludes by showing how global inventory and advanced search capabilities make it easy to quickly identify where a newly disclosed vulnerability or licensing issue impacts your product portfolio. This reactive analysis capability—powered by previously generated SBOMs—positions organizations to respond to security events with speed, accuracy, and confidence.
Best Practices for Operationalizing SCA and SBOM Programs
Finally, the session outlines a practical, two‑phase approach for embedding SCA into development processes while ensuring SBOM accuracy through periodic deeper analysis. It emphasizes aligning with security frameworks, establishing enforceable policies, and automating compliance and reporting processes so that organizations can scale with confidence and meet customer and regulatory expectations.
Frequently Asked Questions
An SBOM acts as a detailed ingredient list of every component—open source, third‑party, and proprietary—embedded in a software product. For software producers, it delivers essential transparency into what is being shipped and helps validate both security posture and licensing obligations. As regulations and customer expectations expand, SBOMs increasingly serve as mandatory artifacts for procurement, compliance, and risk assessments. They also accelerate incident response by making it easy to pinpoint where vulnerable components are used. Ultimately, an SBOM strengthens trust with customers and reduces disruptions during audits or security reviews.
SCA gives software producers visibility into the open source components that make up their applications, helping them uncover vulnerabilities, outdated libraries, and licensing conflicts early. When integrated throughout development, SCA reduces costly rework, speeds up release cycles, and ensures products remain secure without slowing innovation. For monetization teams, SCA lowers the risk of shipping products that later require emergency patches, which can erode customer confidence and delay contract renewals. It also helps meet customer and regulatory demands for transparency, improving win rates in security‑sensitive industries. Strong SCA practices directly support a more efficient and reliable revenue engine
A VEX report clarifies which known vulnerabilities in a product are actually exploitable, significantly reducing noise for both internal teams and customers. Software producers benefit because they can communicate security posture with precision, preventing confusion around harmless CVEs that often trigger lengthy customer questionnaires. Customers gain insight into real‑world exploitability rather than just raw vulnerability counts, which helps them assess operational risk more accurately. For vendors, providing VEX reports can shorten security evaluations during sales cycles. This added clarity helps maintain customer trust while avoiding unnecessary remediation work.
Automating compliance simplifies the process of identifying, validating, and attributing licenses across all dependencies used in a software product. Without automation, teams often struggle with inconsistent documentation, manual reviews, and last‑minute release delays due to missing or incorrect attribution. Automating compliance ensures that third‑party notices are complete and accurate, helping software vendors avoid legal exposure. This also enables faster, more predictable release cycles, which directly influences time‑to‑market. In industries with strict requirements, automation can be the difference between closing deals and getting blocked by compliance red flags.
Embedding SCA directly into CI/CD ensures that every build is automatically scanned for vulnerabilities and license issues, catching risks before they advance downstream. This reduces developer burden by surfacing actionable insights at the moment they matter most. Continuous scanning creates a consistent compliance checkpoint that aligns engineering with legal, security, and product requirements. It also supports faster iteration by preventing last-minute surprises that can derail releases. For product teams, CI/CD‑level SCA becomes a reliable guardrail that maintains quality while supporting rapid delivery.
Supply chain transparency gives customers confidence that a software vendor understands and controls the components within its product. This credibility reduces friction during procurement, particularly in sectors with heightened security demands. Transparent practices—such as delivering SBOMs, VEX reports, and clear compliance documentation—help vendors stand out against competitors who provide limited visibility. This can shorten sales cycles, reduce security questionnaires, and prevent deals from stalling. In the long term, transparency builds trust, which increases customer retention and upsell opportunities.
Shifting left brings security and compliance checks earlier into the development lifecycle, when issues are faster and cheaper to resolve. Developers gain instant feedback about risky dependencies, outdated libraries, or incompatible licenses before code reaches production. This reduces the volume of emergency work later in the cycle and strengthens overall product quality. For software monetization leaders, shifting left allows teams to deliver features faster and with fewer delays caused by compliance bottlenecks. It also improves predictability for release planning and customer commitments.
Proactive vulnerability management ensures that software teams identify and address risks early, preventing severe exposures that could lead to outages, patches, or reputation damage. Addressing vulnerabilities before they become public helps maintain customer trust and prevents churn. It also reduces resource strain from emergency escalations that can pull teams away from revenue‑generating development. This approach supports compliance with industry standards and positions products favorably during security evaluations. By minimizing risk, companies preserve both brand credibility and recurring revenue streams.
When a high‑profile vulnerability emerges, software vendors need to quickly determine whether they are affected and to what extent. Having complete SBOMs and a centralized inventory of components dramatically accelerates this analysis. Vendors can identify impacted products and versions within minutes, rather than manually searching across repositories. This rapid response helps mitigate customer concerns, improves communication, and reduces operational disruption. Fast, accurate responses also demonstrate maturity—an important differentiator in competitive markets.
SBOMs support regulatory initiatives aimed at improving cybersecurity transparency and reducing systemic risk in software supply chains. Customers increasingly require them to evaluate the security posture of the products they purchase and to understand the components they rely on. For businesses selling into government, healthcare, finance, or other regulated markets, SBOMs are quickly becoming non‑negotiable. They also streamline vendor assessments by reducing the back‑and‑forth typical of security questionnaires. As adoption grows, SBOM readiness becomes essential for maintaining eligibility in competitive procurement processes.
Resources
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How to Manage Open Source Risk in M&A
In this webinar, we'll explain the issues, provide ways to mitigate risk and break down why being proactive is critical. Don't wait until a deal is on the table to find out you have a problem. Register to learn more.
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Open Source Software Risk in M&A
Open source risks can derail M&A deals. Read the whitepaper to learn pitfalls, due diligence steps, and ways to mitigate software risk.
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The Supply Chain Risk You Can’t Ignore: A Playbook for Critical Industries
The webinar will benefit development leads, CIOs, and CTOs responsible for navigating compliance and mitigating supply chain risks. Don’t miss out to gain actionable insights for protecting your organization in an increasingly complex environment
White Paper
Risky OSS: How Regulated Industries Can Secure the Software Supply Chain
This whitepaper reviews the state of OSS, four management use cases, and best practices and solutions to help security and legal teams in highly regulated industries. Access now to learn how you can confidently mitigate rising supply chain risk.
Data Sheet
OSS Inspector Plugin
Ensure your code is secure and compliant by effortlessly managing open source dependencies directly in your IDE.
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The Beginner’s Guide to Managing Open Source Software
Join this beginner’s guide to OSS, SCA, OSPOs, and SBOMs to get started on your open source journey. In this productive webinar session by Revenera’s open source expert, Alex Rybak.
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See how Revenera's end-to-end solution delivers a complete, accurate SBOM while managing license compliance and security.