The CISO’s Checklist for the Agentic Software Supply Chain

The developer population is exploding beyond engineering as non-technical teams, from marketing to HR, use AI tools to generate code and deploy functionality with little to no development experience. These new “developers” prioritize speed and output over security, creating an environment where an idea can become a live application in hours.

For CISOs, this shifts the challenge from securing professionally written code to establishing governance for an entirely untrained workforce. We’ve created an actionable checklist for security leaders to apply enterprise security standards to their Agentic Software Supply Chain. By securing the AI assets that grant agents the power to act, you can automate guardrails and prevent unauthorized access to your production environment.

In this checklist, you’ll find how to:

• Establish Total Visibility: Keep tabs on all models, agent skills, MCP servers, and plugins — whether they are on-device, remote, or custom-built.

• Integrate Automated Security Gates: Implement proactive gatekeepers that scan AI components for vulnerabilities and block high-risk assets before they reach developer machines.

• Enforce Granular Governance: Move beyond binary blocking to apply tool-specific permissions, ensuring agents maintain least-privilege access to sensitive data.

• Standardize a Golden Path: Eliminate operational silos by integrating AI assets into your existing supply chain, creating a unified and auditable path to production.

• Mitigate Shadow AI Risks: Identify and monitor unvetted entry points, such as public repositories and unverified containers, to prevent attackers from breaching your perimeter.