Frost Radar™: Software Supply Chain Security, 2024

Frost Radar™: Software Supply Chain Security, 2024

As businesses digitize, the uptake of applications has been inevitable. Digital transformation has boosted the demand for innovation among software producers and software development life cycle (SDLC) developers in order to meet business goals. As a result, software producers are either migrating their services, assets, and applications to cloud environments; adopting open-source code or software for speed and to save money; or adopting advanced software delivery pipeline tools such as integrated development environment (IDE), CI/CD, infrastructure as code (IaC), build automation tools, and GitOps workflow to manage their application development process.

While open-source software components, no-code/low-code platforms, and modern application delivery tools have benefitted the software development process, it has also expanded the attack surface of the software supply chain from code, APIs, workloads, and cloud infrastructure to applications. With the rapid growth of attacks targeting unmonitored areas of the development environment and components in the software supply chain, such as zero-day exploits, malware, code injection, CI/CD pipeline breaches, credential theft, container image security threats, and compliance issues, CISOs and SecOps teams are challenged to secure the SDLC and ensure software supply chain security (SSCS).

With the increasing emphasis on shift-left security or a secure-by-design approach, there is a shift in responsibility aiming to offer more developer-focused security that increases requirements for proof of use of SSCS best practices to ensure secure practices in the developer environment. SSCS, which offers security solutions and practices to protect the SDLC against vulnerabilities and cybersecurity risks, will need to cover vectors such as open-source or third-party components (library or frameworks), proprietary code, repositories, development tools, and developer accounts/code-sharing platforms.

Legacy software, network, and application security solutions are no longer effective in helping organizations navigate this complex and ever-evolving supply chain threat landscape. As organizations look for a more effective strategy in securing the dynamic, distributed, and transient supply chain environment including SDLC, there is a shift in demand to a more modern, automated, and consolidated SSCS strategy.

Frost & Sullivan identified 12 companies that topped the global SSCS market and exemplified visionary innovation efforts in the past year and benchmarked them across 10 Growth and Innovation criteria for this Frost Radar™ analysis. This publication presents competitive profiles of each company on the Frost Radar™, highlighting their strengths and the opportunities that best fit those strengths.