Software Engineering Leaders: 3 Essential Steps to Secure the Supply Chain

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Attacks targeting software supply chains are increasing in both scope and sophistication. According to Gartner’s report, “How Software Engineering Leaders Can Mitigate Software Supply Chain Risks,” action is urgently needed.

Gartner emphasizes that software engineering leaders are at the forefront of digital innovation. They must not only deliver high-quality software but also implement robust security practices to protect the supply chain. While traditional security measures—like vulnerability scanning and patching, remain important, they are no longer enough.

Today’s threats exploit CI/CD pipelines, open-source dependencies, and development systems. Historical attacks such as SolarWinds, NetBeans IDE, Kaseya, and Codecov demonstrate how attackers inject malware into legitimate software and exploit weak dependencies. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will experience software supply chain attacks, a threefold increase from 2021.

The Three Core Recommendations from Gartner

Gartner’s report outlines three critical strategies software engineering leaders should follow to mitigate supply chain risks:

1. Protect the Integrity of Internal and External Code

Malicious code injection can originate from both internal development and external dependencies. Leaders should:

• Enforce strong version control policies to maintain integrity.
• Use trusted component registries and artifact repositories to ensure external dependencies are secure.
• Implement third-party risk management throughout the software delivery lifecycle.

2. Harden the Software Development and Delivery Pipeline

The software build and delivery process is a prime target for attackers. Gartner recommends:

• Secrets management to protect sensitive credentials and tokens.
• Code and container signing/hashing to verify integrity.
• CI/CD security controls that monitor and enforce safe development practices.

As Steve McConnell notes: “In software, the chain isn’t as strong as its weakest link; it’s as weak as all the weak links multiplied together.”

3. Secure the Operating Environment for Developers

Modern DevOps teams often work across multi-cloud platforms and complex toolchains. Privileged accounts, service users, and automation tools can create a broad attack surface. To mitigate this:

• Apply Zero-Trust Network Access (ZTNA) to reduce identity and access exposure.
• Deploy Privileged Access Management (PAM) to monitor and enforce least privilege for DevOps accounts.
• Use dynamic secrets and Just-in-Time (JIT) credentialing to automatically grant and revoke privileges based on active tasks.

Gartner notes that solutions like Britive combine dynamic secrets, authentication, authorization, and JIT credentials to enforce least privilege access, significantly reducing the risk of account compromise.

How Britive Supports Software Supply Chain Security

Software engineering teams are focused on developing and delivering software, not manually managing access controls. Britive’s platform helps teams mitigate supply chain risk by:

• Granting and revoking JIT secrets on the fly.
• Rotating credentials automatically when users leave the organization.
• Enforcing least privilege access to reduce the attack surface.
• Eliminating over-privileged accounts and static API keys.

By securing identities, secrets, and access privileges, Britive helps organizations protect both internal code and external dependencies, strengthen CI/CD pipelines, and maintain secure developer operating environments.

Why These Steps Matter

Software supply chain attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Threats include:

• Malicious code injected into open-source packages.
• Backdoors installed in post-deployment updates.
• Exploitation of third-party vulnerabilities.

By implementing Gartner’s recommendations—protecting code, hardening pipelines, and securing developer environments—software engineering leaders can effectively reduce supply chain risks without slowing innovation.

The combination of Zero Trust principles, JIT credentialing, and least privilege enforcement ensures that development teams can move fast while staying secure.