Glossary
Software bill of materials (SBOM)
An inventory of every component and dependency in a piece of software, so you can find out quickly where a vulnerable one is running.
In plain terms
When a serious vulnerability is announced, the first question is “do we run this, and where?” Without an inventory, teams spend days searching while attackers scan the internet in hours.
An SBOM answers it in minutes. Paired with an owner for each system, it turns a crisis into a patch deadline.
See what happens without it
The failure pattern this protects against, known vulnerability left unremediated, played out step by step.
Scroll the diagram sideways to see every system.
A known, fixable flaw becomes a breach.
What goes wrong:
- A fix for a critical flaw is published.
- One server running it is not in any inventory, so nobody patches it.
- Months later, attackers scanning the internet find it.
- A known, fixable flaw becomes a breach.
With the safeguard:
- A fix for a critical flaw is published.
- Every running component is inventoried with an owner and a deadline.
- The patch is applied before the deadline.
- The scan finds nothing to exploit.
When it mattered
Log4Shell in 2021 sent organizations scrambling to find every place the Log4j library was buried in their software, often several dependencies deep.