Software Supply Chains and the Illusion of Control

In this presentation I am sharing the results of a three-year, industry-wide study on open source development and security practices across 3,000 organizations and 25,000. I will detail how these organizations are employing a vast community of open source component suppliers, warehouses, and development tools that take the form of software supply chains.

Modern software development practices are now consuming BILLIONS of open source and third-party components. The tooling with package managers and build tools such as Maven, Gradle, npm, NuGet, RubyGems and others has promoted the usage of components to a convenient standard practice. As a result, 90% of a typical application is now composed of open source components. The good news: use of the components is improving developer productivity and accelerating time to market.

However, using these components brings ownership and responsibility with it and this fact is largely overlooked. The unspoken truth: not all parts are created equal. For example, 1 in 16 components in use include known security vulnerabilities. Ugh.

This session aims to enlighten development professionals by sharing results from the State of the Software Supply Chain reports from 2015 through 2017. The reports blend of public and proprietary data with expert research and analysis. Attendees in this session will learn:

  • What our analysis of 25,000 applications reveals about the quality and security of software built with open source components

  • How organizations like Mayo Clinic, Exxon, Capital One, the U.S. FDA and Intuit are utilizing the principles of software supply chain automation to improve application security

  • Why avoiding open source components over 3 years old might be a really good idea

  • How to balance the need for speed with quality and security -- early in the development lifecycle

We will also discuss how you can best approach the effort for development teams to identify, track and replace components with known vulnerabilities, while getting more products and new features to market quickly.

Attend this session and gain insight as to how your organization’s application development practices compare to others. I'll share the industry benchmarks to take back and discuss with your development, security, and open source governance teams.

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