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Why SBOMs are mission critical

Zero Trust and Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) are mission-critical components of today’s cybersecurity. That’s why Hikvision has released a new technology white paper, ‘Securing the Software Supply Chain: SBOMs to Protect Your Organisation’.

Technological innovation impacts our daily lives, and although it provides increased accessibility, efficiency and mobility, it also brings challenges for businesses and developers in mitigating dangerous cybersecurity and data privacy risks. Software supply chains are especially vulnerable since they host a large network of retailers, distributors and manufacturers, which creates a higher risk margin of safety and a downstream effect with repercussions for stakeholders.

Supply chain threats can take many forms, such as malware embedded in software updates, flaws found in open-source code or malicious software signed with a stolen code-signing certificate. These kinds of attacks happen so often that we need ways of not only preventing the attacks but also ways to quickly respond to them.

Zero Trust is a strategic architecture developed to prevent data breaches by eliminating the concept of trust from an organisation’s network, specifically automatic trust. In a Zero Trust framework, every user must request privileged access each time they need access to the system. In an effort to achieve a Zero Trust security posture, organisations are implementing a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to further enable transparency into their software components and providers.

Ultimately, maintaining an SBOM, a formal record of software containing details and supply chain relationships of various components used in building software, is critical for organisations to improve their security models and mitigate supply chain disruption.

The increased transparency SBOMs inherently possess enables an accelerated assessment of risks, vulnerabilities and dependencies in software. In the case of a crisis, like the recent Log4j vulnerability, SBOMs help organisations quickly identify active issues and minimise potential financial risks, damages to reputation and loss of productivity. Additionally, SBOMs help achieve compliance with government regulations and foster trust with customers.

When organisations properly deploy and manage SBOMs, they receive a 360-degree view of risk exposures, sometimes before threats are even active. This full-circle perspective provides valuable insight into components that might previously have required a degree of trust that could now be eliminated. After all, businesses cannot afford to be slack on security. In September 2021, the number of data breaches had already exceeded the number of events in all of 2020. Enabling a Zero Trust framework embedded with SBOMs makes technology safer throughout each segment of the supply chain lifecycle.

To learn more, download a copy of the new white paper Securing the Software Supply Chain: SBOMs to Protect Your Organisation at https://info.hikvision.com/hikvision-sbom-white-paper

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