Key Considerations While Selecting a Reliable SCA Tool
SCA, or software composition analysis, is a term that developers and security engineers will encounter increasingly often in the workplace.
Your company is developing applications with a greater reliance on open-source software and containers, putting itself in jeopardy by being exposed to potential security breaches and license violations. Using software composition analysis could help your company deal with this risk.
On the other hand, there are several important things to think about when choosing the best solution, even though the SCA tool you choose may depend on the needs of your company.
Ease of Use
Choose SCA tools that will make life easier for your DevOps team. Since your team should be able to focus their efforts and time on the most critical activities, the SCA solution should be simple and easy to use. Using an SCA tool with a high learning curve might take up your working hours.
You should choose a technology that is easy for developers to use and that you can quickly add to your current development process. The tool should also be scalable to your organization’s needs.
Additionally, make sure the vendor provides developers with sufficient technical documentation as well as technical help that can be easily accessed when necessary.
Integrations
To maintain a team’s level of productivity, a tool needs to be compatible with the tools they already use. Adoption requires SCA tool integration throughout the SDLC. The early incorporation of an SCA tool into the IDE enables developers to make more informed decisions about their open-source use sooner, and the direct reporting of bugs into the issue tracker that they already employ simplifies the process of fixing them. These approaches eliminate codebase issues and deliver new defects to tools developers are acquainted with, which may enhance speed and efficiency. Finally, choosing a tool that meets a wide range of application security testing (AST) needs may give development teams an even more integrated experience.
Inventory Management
Inventory management is a crucial element of the software development life cycle. This is because it enables developers to see the state of all open-source components. With the right inventories, developers, and management can check the security, licensing, and compliance needs of the entire OSS portfolio, including both direct and indirect dependencies.
A sophisticated SCA tool enables automatic inventory management, alleviating major time limitations for development teams. Additionally, the program should be able to detect transitive dependencies to provide full transparency. It should also support a wide range of programming languages and frameworks, with a focus on those used by the company’s projects and environments.
Costs
Pricing may be further subdivided into direct and indirect expenses incurred by the firm. The purchase of the tool and any fees associated with it are considered direct expenses. Direct costs include integration or pilot expenditures incurred as a consequence of installation and infrastructure expenses. Depending on the organization’s decision regarding hosting, changes to the firm’s infrastructure may be significant.
A corporation’s indirect expenses are primarily concerned with the expenditure of manpower. If developers can solve all or the majority of the problems, they could save thousands of dollars. A good SCA tool allows for the detection of hundreds or even thousands of vulnerabilities in a system’s code.
Support for Deployment Models
Many SCA tools allow for variety. A company may choose on-premises, cloud-based, or hybrid hosting methods. Customers may save money by using cloud-based or hybrid alternatives rather than on-premises deployment, which gives the maximum control over confidential data. Operational variance varies by company. Consider getting in contact with a security specialist to acquire further information and support in determining an acceptable deployment process for your firm.
Prioritization
The number of vulnerabilities found in open-source components is always going up, and each year, hundreds of new ones are found.
SCA methods often find hundreds or even thousands of vulnerabilities. This causes teams’ backlogs to grow quickly and make them feel like they can’t keep up.
Since it is quite unlikely that you will be capable of fixing all of the issues on the list, you need to determine which ones will provide you with the most beneficial in comparison to the amount of effort it will take to remediate them at the end.
Your ability to manage risk and take measures will be considerably impacted as a direct consequence of these activities. On the flip side, inappropriate prioritization may result in friction and may be destructive to developer trust, both of which are negative for the process.
