An SBOM is a comprehensive list of all the software components, dependencies, and metadata associated with an application. The SBOM functions as the inventory of all the building blocks that make up a software product. With it, organizations can better understand, manage, and secure their applications: CrowdStrike.
So why has inventorying become a necessity? Because modern software supply chains have become too opaque and too fragmented for organizations to manage safely. This was because, as enterprises grew, they built, bought, and ran applications composed of hundreds or thousands of components without any clear visibility into their origins, dependencies, or vulnerabilities. This opacity and fragmentation are resulting in a surge in high-impact supply-chain incidents, making the fact that software has outgrown traditional governance models painfully clear and a structured mechanism to understand what truly exists inside an application was desperately needed. SBOMs provided exactly this mechanism, which was an authoritative, machine-readable inventory capable of illuminating the hidden layers of software composition and enabling rapid, informed decision-making during security events.
As a result, SBOMs have now become widely discussed, frequently mandated, and increasingly embedded into DevSecOps workflows. However, while the tooling has matured and the standards are clearer, the fundamental question remains: Have SBOM solutions actually fulfilled the purpose they were created for, or has their promise of transparency outpaced the reality of operational insight?
The 5 Ws and one H of SBOMs:
Modern software is built on inherited complexity. Dependencies are layered on top of dependencies, extended through upstream maintainers, distributed through packages and registries, and deployed across diverse runtime environments. Before the emergence of SBOMs, organizations had no dependable method to determine which components existed across their products or how those components were interconnected. Sure, there were SCA tools and manual inventories, but they were fragmented and non‑standard. Consequently, when vulnerabilities such as Log4Shell or the XZ backdoor emerged, enterprises had no option but to opt for expensive, reactive discovery efforts, re-scanning environments, coordinating with developers under pressure, and relying on incomplete inventories.
SBOMs were created to eliminate this uncertainty by providing a complete, standardized, and continuously updated representation of software composition. This representation allows organizations to gain network visibility that would enable them to determine exposure, trace lineages, evaluate exploitabilities, and prioritize remediation. The vision of transforming software transparency from an aspirational goal into a measurable operational reality was ambitious but necessary. That brings us to our next question: what is the current state of the SBOM ecosystem?
The increasing adoption of the SBOM landscape has led to its expansion into several categories, each addressing a distinct part of the supply-chain risk challenge:
- Software Composition Analysis (SCA) platforms, which specialize in discovering components at the code and dependency level
- Cloud-native and container security platforms, which generate SBOMs for images, registries, and Kubernetes workloads
- Open-source generators, which allow the creation of lightweight SBOMs within developer workflows
- Supply-chain intelligence platforms, which correlate, normalize, enrich, and govern SBOMs at enterprise scale
This ecosystem is rich and increasingly sophisticated, but the fragmentation across categories often results in overlapping, inconsistent, or partially compatible outputs.
Where Vendors Have Made Significant Progress
1. Reliability and Adoption: Dependency discovery across multi-language codebases, binaries, and container images is now accurate and predictable. Standards like SPDX and CycloneDX are consistently supported, and exporting SBOMs has become an expected baseline capability across modern security and DevOps tooling.
2. Integration into CI/CD Pipelines: Organizations can now automatically generate SBOMs during build processes, attach them to artifacts, enforce open-source governance policies, and block risky dependencies before they reach production. This represents a meaningful shift from manual, audit-driven SBOM creation toward automated, workflow-driven transparency.
3. Organizational Accountability: Even partial SBOM adoption has forced enterprises to rethink how they evaluate vendor software, manage open-source dependencies, and respond to vulnerability disclosures. SBOMs have become integral to procurement due diligence, regulatory compliance, and internal governance programs.
While integrating SBOM into your security stack will help you gain more visibility into your software environment, QKS Group‘s Associate Director Research Nikhilesh Naik has a word of caution. “SBOMs are moving from compliance checkboxes to strategic intelligence assets that help organizations understand concentration risk, supplier exposure, and the operational fragility hidden inside modern software supply chains. To unlock this potential, vendors must ensure SBOMs are trustworthy, lifecycle-aligned, and enriched with meaningful metadata, and enterprises should incorporate them into vendor risk scoring, contract evaluation, and incident-response readiness stack so SBOMs drive real strategic advantage rather than passive documentation.”
Areas That Need Improvement
1. Static, Outdated, or Incomplete SBOMs: The SBOM’s point-in-time nature means it becomes outdated the moment new dependencies are introduced. Users need to continuously regenerate and enrich their SBOMs to ensure they are not working with an outdated view of their risk surface.
2. Overwhelming Insights: Large organizations accumulate hundreds or thousands of SBOMs from internal teams, vendors, registries, and open-source projects. Without normalization, correlation, and lifecycle management, the sheer volume of the SBOMs reduces visibility, rather than enhancing it.
3. Business or Operational Context: An SBOM identifies vulnerabilities, but it does not inherently convey whether an affected system is externally exposed, business critical, protected by compensating controls, or impacted in practice. Without this necessary context, SBOMs delay resolutions.
4. Organizational Maturity vs. Tooling Capability: Many organizations continue to treat SBOMs as compliance checkboxes for audits rather than as dynamic operational assets. This results in SBOMs that exist on paper but do not actively shape vulnerability management, incident response, procurement decisions, or architectural governance.
Vendor Landscape:
The followingis a description of key vendors highlighting their SBOM-specific strengths.
Vendors with Strong SBOM Capabilities
- Synopsys Black Duck: Synopsys Black Duck provides deep and highly accurate component discovery across extensive codebases by generating complete SBOMs that are enriched with license intelligence and policy governance essential for enterprise-scale transparency. Its strong integration into development pipelines ensures that SBOMs remain both consistent and continuously actionable.
- Sonatype: Sonatype excels in policy-driven governance, producing SBOMs that are tightly coupled with automated hygiene controls and continuous vulnerability insights. Its lifecycle approach ensures that SBOMs evolve alongside software updates, offering sustained visibility rather than one-time snapshots.
- Mend.io: Mend.io delivers SBOM generation integrated with clear remediation guidance. This enables organizations to operationalize SBOM data instead of just storing it. Its automation capabilities help teams prioritize vulnerabilities based on real exposure and policy needs.
- Aqua Security: Aqua Security generates accurate SBOMs for container images and cloud-native artifacts, ensuring full visibility across registries and Kubernetes environments. Its strength lies in mapping SBOM data to runtime behaviors, reducing blind spots in dynamic, container-driven ecosystems.
- ReversingLabs: ReversingLabs provides advanced SBOM enrichment and integrity verification for binaries, ensuring components are authentic, untampered, and fully traceable. Its focus on software provenance makes it particularly effective for organizations evaluating multi-vendor supply chains.
Conclusion:
SBOMs have unquestionably helped improve the industry’s standards for network visibility. Organizations can now generate SBOMs automatically, embed them into CI/CD pipelines, attach them to vendor contracts, and use them to strengthen compliance. However, the industry still falls short of the ultimate goal: enabling organizations to instantly evaluate and contextualize risk during major vulnerability events without manual effort.
The next stage of SBOM evolution will depend on:
- continuous regeneration and automated freshness
- enterprise-scale normalization and correlation
- contextual risk scoring aligned with business impact
- enriched intelligence across software supply chains
- integration into incident response, architecture governance, and procurement
The transparency revolution will remain incomplete until SBOMs evolve from static inventories into dynamic, intelligence-rich systems of record. The industry has made meaningful progress, but true supply-chain resilience will require SBOMs to become continuously updated, context-aware, and deeply embedded into every critical decision-making workflow.
With comprehensive inputs from Nikhilesh Naik