Streamline Your SBOM Management With SBOM Manager

March 19, 2024
By Omar Torres

4 minute read time

Modern software development means applications are woven from diverse components sourced from in-house development, open source repositories, and external vendors. Keeping track of all these dependencies is becoming more critical, as governments recognize the challenge and start to use regulations to standardize how software supply chain security is managed. Today, the software bill of materials (SBOMs) is seen as the key tool by which software across every industry can be audited and regulated.

What Are SBOMs and Why Are They Important?

An SBOM is a detailed ingredients list for your software. It catalogs all the components that make up your application, including libraries, frameworks, and other dependencies.

This information provides a clear picture of your software's composition, offering several benefits:

• Improved compliance: A growing number of regulations require organizations to submit SBOMs with their software.
• Enhanced security: SBOMs help identify vulnerabilities within your software's components. By knowing exactly what versions of which components you're using and what vulnerabilities you may be bringing in, you can quickly assess your risk exposure and take steps to patch vulnerabilities before they're exploited.
• License management: SBOMs can help you track license information for all your software components, ensuring you're adhering to the terms of use for each one.

Introducing SBOM Manager: Your One-Stop Shop for Streamlined SBOM Management

SBOM Manager is a world-class tool designed to streamline the way you manage SBOMs across your entire software portfolio. Sonatype's deep roots in the open source community, including contributing to open source SBOM tooling, maintaining Maven Central and recognizing the importance of SBOMs, along with our industry-leading vulnerability and component data, has led us to build the premier SBOM management tool. Here's how it empowers your organization:

• Effortless ingestion : Seamlessly gather SBOMs from various sources ensuring a complete picture of your software portfolio.
• Centralized storage : Maintain a secure and organized repository for all your SBOMs, including original and augmented versions, facilitating easy access, retrieval, and audit whenever needed.
• Powerful search functionality : Combined with Sonatype's data, analysis, and continuous monitoring, you can quickly locate specific components, license data, or vulnerabilities across your SBOM collection, saving valuable time and resources.
• Enrich with vulnerability data : Augment SBOMs with Sonatype's best-in-class vulnerability data and add Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) entries to enhance your SBOMs with critical security information.
• Manage licensing in one place : Track the open source licenses that apply to your software and ensure compliance with license requirements.
• Dual-format distribution : Generate and distribute SBOMs in both CycloneDX and SPDX formats, ensuring compatibility with the widest range of tools and workflows.

SBOM Manager is built to integrate seamlessly with your existing development tools. This allows you to incorporate SBOM generation and management directly into your existing workflows, minimizing disruption and maximizing efficiency.

Use Cases for SBOM Manager

SBOM Manager offers a wide range of use cases for organizations of all sizes.

• SBOM audits : During SBOM audits, SBOM Manager provides a readily available and comprehensive record of your software's components, simplifying the process and reducing audit fatigue.
• Compliance checks : SBOM Manager helps you ensure compliance with regulations by providing a clear view of all components and their associated risk.
• Vulnerability management : If you are new to software composition analysis (SCA), SBOMs can help you proactively identify and address vulnerabilities within your software by leveraging Sonatype's unparalleled vulnerability and component data with SBOM Manager's functionality.

Ready to Take Control of Your SBOMs?

SBOM Manager is the key to simplify regulatory compliance and unlock efficient and effective SBOM management within your organization.

"At Sonatype, we understand that the value of an SBOM hinges on the accuracy of the data feeding into it. We see a surging demand, further amplified by regulations, for organizations to not only generate SBOMs but also understand, monitor, and manage them effectively. That's the driving force behind SBOM Manager. It's a user-friendly tool supporting both first-party and third-party SBOMs, that provides a single source of truth for SBOM-backed security, legal, and compliance workflows across the organization."

- Stephen Magill, Vice President, Product Innovation at Sonatype

Written by Omar Torres
Omar Torres is a Product Marketing Manager for Lifecycle at Sonatype. His focus is on capturing the stories compelling both our product teams and customers to get the most out of the open source ecosystem. While a part of the Devsecops community by trade, he enjoys exploring sunny San Diego, where he currently resides, in his free time.