Gartner defines software supply chain security (SSCS) tools as those that enable the building of secure software by protecting against compromises during development and delivery. These protections extend to source code, developer identities, development tools, delivery pipelines, and postdeployment patches. SSCS tools reduce third-party risks through policy-based curation of dependencies, software composition analysis (SCA) and software bill of materials (SBOM) inspection. They ensure artifact provenance and traceability with signing and verification as they pass through development and delivery pipelines. SSCS tools support SaaS and hybrid deployment models, and complement DevOps platforms in improving the organization’s DevSecOps maturity.
VA solutions identify, categorize and prioritize vulnerabilities as well as orchestrate their remediation or mitigation. Their primary focus is vulnerability and security configuration assessments for enterprise risk identification and reduction, and reporting against various compliance standards. VA can be delivered via on-premises, hosted and cloud-based solutions, and it may use appliances and agents. Core capabilities include: - Discovery, identification and reporting on device, OS, software vulnerabilities and configuration against security-related criteria - Establishing a baseline for systems, applications and databases to identify and track changes in state - Reporting options for compliance, control frameworks and multiple roles Standard capabilities include: - Pragmatic remediation prioritization with the ability to correlate vulnerability severity, asset context and threat context that then presents a better picture of true risk for your specific environment - Guidance for remediating and configuring compensating controls - Management of scanner instances, agents and gateways - Direct integration with, or API access to, asset management tools, workflow management tools and patch management tools