SBOM Best Practices: Five Ways to Strengthen Your Software Supply Chain Security

A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is no longer a nice-to-have—it’s a critical cyber defense mechanism for any organization building, buying, or operating modern software. SBOMs provide detailed insight into what’s inside your software applications, from open source components to transitive dependencies. This visibility is essential to detect, manage, and mitigate security risks in the software supply chain.

But while SBOMs are becoming a baseline requirement for software development and procurement, effective implementation is where many organizations struggle. Creating an SBOM is one thing—using it effectively to secure your environment is another. To help your team succeed, here are five SBOM best practices to maximize the value and security impact of your SBOM program.

1. Define your business needs for SBOM adoption

The first SBOM best practice is to clearly understand why your organization needs one. Is your SBOM initiative driven by regulatory compliance? Customer expectations? Security architecture modernization?

For many companies, SBOMs are now mandatory. In the United States, Executive Order 14028 requires vendors working with federal agencies to produce SBOMs to demonstrate the security and legal compliance of their code. Other industries—such as healthcare, financial services, critical infrastructure, and publicly traded companies—are increasingly being held to similar standards.

Even if compliance isn’t the trigger, SBOMs provide real business value. By mapping every component in your software, they offer deep insight into your code base and dependencies, allowing you to proactively identify vulnerable or outdated libraries before they’re exploited. Understanding your needs upfront helps shape how you generate, store, analyze, and use your SBOMs over time.

2. Choose the right tool: Purpose-built for SBOMs

Using spreadsheets or email threads to manage your SBOM is not just inefficient—it’s risky. One of the most overlooked SBOM best practices is selecting the right tooling. A generic tool may list components but still leave you exposed if it can’t scale, lacks remediation guidance, or generates SBOMs in incompatible formats.

Look for SBOM tools that:

• Support all major programming languages and package managers
• Automatically generate machine-readable SBOMs in formats like SPDX or CycloneDX
• Identify both direct and transitive dependencies
• Update dynamically as code changes
• Include remediation paths for vulnerabilities

Good SBOM tools also reduce false positives and simplify integration with your existing CI/CD pipeline. Selecting a platform that’s designed specifically for SBOM generation and management helps ensure your process is scalable, automated, and accurate.

3. Automate SBOM generation and remediation workflows

Manual SBOM generation is slow and error-prone—and non-compliant with many regulatory frameworks. One of the most important SBOM best practices is automating your generation and remediation processes.

Automated SBOM software allows for continuous discovery of new components, real-time monitoring of updates, and automatic flagging of anomalies. This is particularly important when working with large codebases or fast-moving development teams.

In addition, continuous remediation capabilities help you respond quickly to security issues. When a vulnerability is discovered, the system should:

• Alert your team
• Identify affected components
• Suggest safe upgrade paths or patches
• Verify the impact of a fix before deployment

Automation reduces the burden on engineering and security teams while ensuring your SBOMs are always current and actionable.

4. Ensure full visibility across your tech stack

A strong SBOM program must provide full visibility across your entire software ecosystem. One of the common pitfalls in SBOM adoption is relying on a tool that only covers a subset of the technology stack.

Your SBOM solution should include:

• All development languages in use
• Microservices and containers
• Embedded dependencies
• Third-party APIs and SDKs
• Proprietary code where possible

It should also support standardized SBOM formats and align with evolving SBOM standards such as SPDX, CycloneDX, and SWID tags. Broader coverage ensures you are not missing any blind spots in your software supply chain.

5. Supplement SBOMs with contextual artifacts

An SBOM by itself is rarely enough to communicate the full security picture—especially to customers, auditors, or partners. One of the more advanced SBOM best practices is to pair SBOMs with supporting documentation that adds valuable context.

Some key supplements to consider:

• Open source license disclosures: Especially where you’ve purchased commercial rights to dual-licensed components.
• VEX (Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange) files: These indicate whether a known vulnerability is actually exploitable in your environment, reducing false alarms.
• Internal security policy overviews: Documentation showing how you prioritize and remediate vulnerabilities.

Adding these companion artifacts demonstrates that your organization not only knows what’s in its software, but also understands and actively manages the risks.

Final thoughts: SBOM best practices enable security and trust

SBOMs are becoming a standard part of the modern software lifecycle—and for good reason. They help organizations build safer software, respond to vulnerabilities faster, and meet growing demands for transparency from regulators, partners, and customers.

However, to unlock those benefits, you need to follow SBOM best practices. That means clearly defining your goals, selecting purpose-built tools, automating key processes, ensuring full component coverage, and supplementing your SBOMs with contextual information that shows you understand your risk.

Following these practices turns your SBOM program from a checkbox exercise into a strategic asset that strengthens your security posture and builds trust across your ecosystem.