Open-source software (OSS) powers over 90% of modern applications, but its widespread use comes with significant risks—operational, security, and legal. Tracking and managing these risks across distributed teams and cloud environments is challenging, often leading to compliance gaps. A global Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) provides full visibility into dependencies, vulnerabilities, and compliance requirements, making it an essential tool for modern enterprises.
However, maintaining an up-to-date SBOM across multiple teams and environments is complex. OpsMx simplifies this process by automating SBOM creation, tracking security exposures, and enforcing compliance—so enterprises can focus on innovation while maintaining a secure software supply chain. Let’s explore why a global SBOM is essential and how you can implement it seamlessly with OpsMx.
Why a Global SBOM is Essential for Enterprise Risk Management
A Software Bill of Materials is a complete catalog of all open-source, commercial, and proprietary software components used in a company’s infrastructure and products. A consolidated view of open source dependencies enables companies to assess threats and take preventive measures.
Having a global SBOM in place and maintaining it up to date has a multitude of benefits:
- Visibility: Track what software is used and where it is installed.
- Traceability: Track a components’ relationships and interdependencies.
- Accountability: Assign accountability for maintenance and security of each of these components.
- Risk Management: Address weak areas before they become major issues.
A global SBOM for all systems, clouds, and applications is a fundamental single point of truth that facilitates informed decision-making. By leveraging a global SBOM, organizations can monitor key metrics like GitHub activity, contributor engagement, and project health, ensuring that every open-source component is reliable, sustainable, and secure.
Significance of OpsMx’s Global SBOM Insights
OpsMx automates SBOM generation across all your environments—providing a real-time, consolidated view of your software supply chain. With built-in security scanning, compliance tracking, and proactive risk detection, OpsMx transforms SBOM from a static report into a dynamic risk management tool.
Evaluating Operational Risks Using a Global SBOM
a) Stars & Forks
GitHub stars and forks signal a project’s adoption and community engagement. While they don’t guarantee security, a widely used and actively maintained OSS project is more likely to receive timely updates, fixes, and documentation improvements.
- High Star Count: Shows high-scale application and a robust support system.
- Many Forks: Implies continuous improvement and experimenting in society.
Why It Matters: A project with strong community support is more likely to address bugs quickly, introduce new features, and maintain up-to-date documentation.
b) Unique Contributors
The number of distinct contributors is also a determining factor of a project’s health. Several contributors to a project reap the benefits of:
- Broader review of code, higher overall quality.
- Greater resilience in case a primary maintainer retires.
- Faster bug fixing and updating owing to a distributed development process.
Why It’s Relevant: One-developer projects become risky when one lone developer abandons it. Sustainability is maintained when there is a large number of contributors.
Assessing Security Risks Using a Global SBOM
a) Number of CVEs in Last 12 Months
The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system is utilized to track publicly disclosed security vulnerabilities. The trend of CVEs over time is utilized to assess a project’s security status.
- High count of CVEs: May indicate high frequency of vulnerabilities, but also active security scanning.
- Low CVE Count: Could mean fewer vulnerabilities or a lack of thorough security testing.
Why It’s Relevant: Disclosure of vulnerabilities allows for prioritizing of patching. An unexpected influx of CVEs can signal a need for emergency remediation or a different course of action.
How OpsMx Helps Manage Security Risks
OpsMx goes beyond basic CVE scanning. By integrating with NVD, KEV Catalog, and GitHub Security Advisories, OpsMx provides real-time risk scoring and automated policy enforcement to prevent vulnerabilities from reaching production. Our risk-prioritization engine ensures security teams focus on high-impact threats first, reducing alert fatigue and improving remediation efficiency.
b) Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
MTTR measures how quickly security vulnerabilities are addressed.
- Fast MTTR: Illustrates a security-focused dedicated development team or community.
- Slow MTTR: Suggests fewer resources or slower response times, resulting in more exposure to security attacks.
Why It’s Relevant: Even a heavily used project is risky if it is too time-consuming to address primary vulnerabilities. MTTR enables companies to prioritize their security investments.
How OpsMx Helps Improve MTTR
With OpsMx, enterprises can track not just the number of vulnerabilities but also the speed at which they are resolved. OpsMx provides risk-based prioritization, ensuring that security teams focus on high-risk vulnerabilities first, improving overall security posture while maintaining development velocity.
Managing Legal Risks Using a Global SBOM
a) License Type
Every open-source module is bound to a particular licence, which controls its terms of use and distribution in a legal manner. The most prevalent licenses used are MIT, Apache 2.0, GPL, and BSD, each of which has different terms regarding:
- Attribution
- Distribution rights
- Patent protections
- Copyleft requirements
Why It’s Relevant: Failure to meet licensing requirements can lead to legal repercussions. As an example, software licensed using GPL can require derivative work to be open-sourced, while permissive licenses like MIT or Apache allow more freedom of use but require attributions.
Tracking license types in a global SBOM allows for compliance, reduces exposure to potential legal issues, and aligns open source use with organizational policy.
How OpsMx Helps Manage Legal and Licensing Risks
OpsMx provides continuous license tracking and policy enforcement to prevent legal and compliance violations. By integrating directly into your SBOM, OpsMx automatically flags OSS components with restrictive licenses (e.g., GPL) and ensures teams use only approved, enterprise-compliant libraries. This reduces the risk of legal disputes and compliance failures.
Advantages of Real-Time, Centralized SBOM Insights
- Proactive Security: An SBOM that is integrated with vulnerability scanners notifies teams of newly released CVEs or unsafe licenses, making it possible to expedite remediation.
- Efficient Allocation of Resources: Organizations can prioritize security efforts on most critical threats based on their understanding of patterns of vulnerability.
- Simplified Compliance: SBOMs allow you to monitor licenses to help you avoid potential legal issues, i.e., audits or mergers and acquisitions.
- Comprehensive Risk Management: The inclusion of operational, security, and legal metrics gives a total view of each software component’s risk profile.
- Enhanced Collaboration: An open SBOM facilitates transparency and cooperation between security, development, and legal teams to support data-informed decision-making.
Best Practices in Developing and Maintaining a Global SBOM
- Automate SBOM Creation: Use tools in CI/CD pipelines to automatically track new software components.
- Stay Informed of Vulnerabilities: Keep SBOM information up to date with security repositories (e.g., NVD, GitHub Security Advisories) to stay informed of new threats.
- Define Governance Policies: Establish clear rules of acceptable risk in licensing, security exposures, and interaction with the community.
- Assign Ownership: Designate responsibility for monitoring and maintaining each open source component.
- Encourage Reliable Software Use: Recommend the use of strongly backed OSS packages that have a good security track record, liberal licenses, and active support communities.
Conclusion
Global SBOM insights play a vital role in managing open source risks. It can help you keep tabs on key indicators such as GitHub activity, contributor engagement, security vulnerabilities, and licensing types—giving organisations a comprehensive view of their software dependencies and project health. They can use this to make strategic decisions around software upgrades, cost-optimizations, and security strategies.
With OpsMx, implementing and maintaining a Global SBOM is easier than ever. We help enterprises automate SBOM generation, streamline maintenance, automate compliance tracking, and secure their software supply chain. Get in touch to see how OpsMx can help you take control of your OSS security.
About OpsMx
OpsMx is a leading innovator and thought leader in the Application Security space. Leading technology companies such as Google, Cisco, Western Union, among others rely on OpsMx to secure their application lifecycle.
OpsMx Delivery Shield offers Risk Prioritization, Remediation, and Compliance Automation—all with an integrated suite of open source Application Security tools to help you enforce security policies and achieve unified visibility.
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