By submitting this form, you agree to our 

Answer twenty questions about your artifact and supply chain practices. Get a custom report card showing your maturity score against key regulatory and compliance frameworks.

Artifact Security Maturity Assessment

The attack on SolarWinds in December 2020 was a watershed moment: it provided a stark demonstration of how much damage a compromised software supply chain could cause, and a wake-up call for how much trust organizations place in the integrity of the software they depend on. Overnight, everyone learned what a software supply chain was.

Developers spent weeks mitigating the risk. Six years later, attackers are now supercharged by agentic AI’s capabilities, and increasingly going after open source packages. The very dependencies that make modern software possible are also putting it at risk. The scale and magnitude of today’s onslaught, with multiple attacks a day, would have been unimaginable in 2020.

At the same time AI enables attackers to target any company through the software that runs their business, companies are also building more software than ever. The pace of software development has outstripped what any manual review processes could keep up with. Dependency decisions were traditionally made by a human developer, but now those decisions are increasingly made by AI, either by a citizen developer who is vibe coding or by an AI agent whose mission doesn't include keeping your supply chain free of malicious packages and actors.

The usual security model teams have relied on - periodic scanning, resolving issues immediately where possible, backlogging lower-priority issues - can’t keep up with the pace or the style of the attacks we face today. In March 2026, a maintainer account for the popular npm package axios (100M+ weekly downloads) 

, allowing attackers to slip in a malicious dependency carrying a postinstall script that ran the instant npm install was called. A malicious package can compromise a developer's machine or a build pipeline instantly, before the first build. Workflows built to protect production are no longer enough to prevent breaches.

Protecting your entire organization from cyberattacks requires defense in depth. A critical component of keeping software safe is a curated repository. This means a private, controlled repository that manages software artifacts from the point of ingestion, all the way to production.

A curated repository builds a trusted supply chain through knowledge, enforcement, and orchestration

When every pull, every build, and every package request flows through a centralized repository like Cloudsmith, you get one place to control what software enters your supply chain, and how it moves through to production.

The right private, curated repository serves several functions. It:

Covers the packages, formats, and ecosystems your developers use

Inspects packages to understand their composition, while extracting key metadata

Understands where a package is coming from and where it goes

Enriches what’s known about a package to include quality and risk characteristics

Can prevent use of a package based on that knowledge, or until more is known about it

Can govern how a package moves toward production, or whether it's allowed at all

This kind of curated repository becomes the orchestration layer that builds trust in your software supply chain. The way to get it is to use a universal artifact management platform with risk detection and policy built in. 

Provides visibility into where every package comes from

Aggregates insights into package quality and risk

Updates its risk data as new threats emerge

Provides control over how software components move toward production

Policy management and continuous risk detection are now baseline requirements

 capabilities should be considered table stakes for any organization that wants to control and secure its software supply chain.

Write your own logic in Rego, the open source policy language used in the Open Policy Agent (OPA) framework, tailored to your specific security and compliance requirements.

Policies are evaluated on package ingestion, and re-evaluated in real time automatically as policies or threat intelligence changes

 hold new package versions back from clients for a set window of time, so security researchers have a chance to identify malicious releases.

Cloudsmith-recommended policies already written for you, so you don't need to write Rego from scratch.

A full audit trail of every policy evaluation, viewable in the web app and downloadable via API

Because they’re written as code, Cloudsmith policies are incredibly powerful and flexible. You can make decisions based on key attributes of a package, like license information or package age. Cloudsmith's continuous risk detection systems bring security intelligence into the policy layer, so your policies keep up with the latest threat intelligence.

In the Cloudsmith platform, threat detection runs automatically, for every supported package format in your workspace. Cloudsmith refreshes threat intelligence every five minutes, so if a new or updated record affects packages already in your repositories, they’ll be matched automatically. The days of scheduling periodic rescans are over.

To make sure nothing is missed, packages are matched to public security advisories based on a standard identifier called a package URL (PURL). Cloudsmith supports SemVer and ecosystem-native version ranges when matching advisories to specific versions of packages.

A single publicly identified vulnerability may be reported by multiple sources, resulting in duplicate records from different upstream databases. Cloudsmith automatically detects these duplicates, grouping and surfacing one primary record per vulnerability. This results in cleaner data and more focused reviews.

By default, packages are sorted by severity, highest first: Malware, then Critical, High, Medium, Low, and Unknown.


Control your software supply chain without slowing down developers

Over the years, we’ve found that artifact management has historically been the purview of platform engineering teams. These teams traditionally look to centralize critical workflows, to ensure consistent, standard delivery. But we’ve seen a change in the market recently. Security teams are increasingly recognizing that centralizing these workflows enhances security. Cyber security teams can partner with developers by enforcing policies that redirect direct access to public registries to a curated, managed repository that serves as a trusted proxy. Development teams still need to move fast, so enforcement actions that affect a developer's workflow have to be built with the developer experience in mind.

Cloudsmith solves this in a uniquely developer-friendly way. Cloudsmith policies remove bad packages from the index that is presented to package managers. This changes the package version selection process, so that developers get compliant packages the first time, rather than an error message and a broken build. If a specific pinned package version is requested, but that version has been quarantined for security reasons, clear messaging and integrated workflows tell developers why their build failed, and what they can do about it.

A secure software supply chain starts with universal artifact management

We’ve all come a long way since the SolarWinds attack in 2020. We’ve learned how to secure the software supply chain, without slowing down developers. Every package your team requests should pass through curated repositories, where policies tailored to your security and compliance requirements can protect your builds, backed by realtime, always-updated threat intelligence. The artifact management platform serves as the orchestration layer, across every team, pipeline, and AI agent, enforced at the source, automatically.
See how 

Alison Sickelka

VP of Product

Trust your software supply chain from ingestion to production

Across your organization, teams are rapidly adopting AI. They’re pulling AI models and datasets from public sources like Hugging Face and wiring them into workflows that are now reaching production. For platform and security leaders, this creates a familiar challenge: artifacts are entering the software supply chain outside established governance and controls.

Unmanaged AI artifacts carry real risks. They can’t be traced back to their source, they don’t follow compliance processes, and they often bypass the review gates you rely on for code and containers. Left unchecked, they become blind spots and liabilities in your supply chain. Without action, AI artifacts become the weakest link in your supply chain security.

The answer is to manage AI models and datasets with the same level of control and oversight as every other artifact in your supply chain. By managing them through a unified platform, with shared repositories, consistent policy enforcement, and full observability, you ensure that AI workflows are governed by the same standards as the rest of your software supply chain.

The growing adoption of AI models and datasets introduces both opportunity and risk. On one hand, models accelerate delivery by enabling new capabilities at unprecedented speed. On the other hand, they introduce opaque dependencies, security blind spots, and compliance risks into the supply chain, areas where governance practices are still catching up.

Some risks begin earlier in the lifecycle, like poisoned training data or tampered weights during model creation, which can compromise a model before it ever reaches a registry. But the most immediate challenge for platform and security leaders is governance once these artifacts enter the supply chain. Teams often pull models directly from public sources like Hugging Face, bypassing review and scanning. Without versioning and provenance tracking, it’s nearly impossible to prove which model is in use, where it came from, or what depends on it. And without consistent policies, organizations struggle to demonstrate compliance when auditors or regulators come calling.

These risks can’t be left unmanaged. The question is how to bring AI artifacts under control.

AI models and datasets are artifacts, and like any artifact, they need to be versioned, audited, and controlled with the same enterprise-grade policies you’ve put in place for packages like code libraries and container images. As organizations deliver production applications powered by AI, the priority for platform and security leaders is clear: maintain visibility, integrity, and trust in the components that make up these builds.

Cloudsmith’s new AI Model registry support

A Single Source of Truth for AI Models in DevOps

Cloudsmith extends artifact management to AI models and datasets, promoting them to first-class artifacts in your supply chain. This means you can control, secure, and distribute models alongside your language libraries, containers, and other binaries, all governed by the same policies and observability already in place.

: Require approvals, license checks, and compliance gates before a model or dataset is deployed.

: Every artifact is versioned, hashed, and immutable, so tampering can be detected and blocked.

: Capture where a model or dataset came from, how it has changed, and what depends on it.

: Manage AI models (PyTorch, TensorFlow, ONNX, and more) alongside other binary artifacts in the same repositories.

: Proxy and cache models and datasets directly from the Hugging Face Hub, while continuing to use the Hugging Face SDK for training and deployment — ensuring developers keep their workflows while you enforce governance.

DevOps has always been about balancing efficiency, stability, and security. The rise of AI workflows doesn’t change that balance - it heightens the need for it. By incorporating AI models and datasets into Cloudsmith, you extend the same supply chain controls that protect your code and containers to the AI artifacts now driving production systems.

The result: faster innovation without unmanaged risk, and a single platform to govern every component that ships to production.

Learn more about Cloudsmith's AI Model Registry here.

How to securely source your LLM models from Hugging Face

Extending supply chain governance to AI artifacts

Healthy competition makes industries stronger, products better, and benefits customers. JFrog has recently published two blog posts (

) criticizing our platform, a clear sign that Cloudsmith’s approach - built cloud-native, open, transparent, and customer-focused - is winning over customers.

JFrog’s own CEO has framed Cloudsmith as just “

fluffy marketing spin and empty presale promises.

” We disagree strongly. Our platform is proven in production every day, powering software delivery for some of the world’s most demanding organizations. Enterprise customers 

use Cloudsmith to build, secure and deliver software at scale

. And we are open about our capabilities for anyone to evaluate firsthand, through a 

 that shows exactly what it’s like to work with Cloudsmith.

JFrog’s latest tests seem intentionally designed to mislead. Rather than respond point by point, we invite customers to conduct their own comparisons. We welcome head-to-head evaluations because this is where our truly cloud-native, massive-scale architecture really shines. We believe our vision for the software supply chain serves customers best today and into the future. We’ve faced off against JFrog in a number of competitive situations recently, and we’ve won more than we’ve lost. It’s the spirit of healthy competition that has prompted all of this recent attention from JFrog. We welcome it.

JFrog has been able to test our platform because we let them trial Cloudsmith, too. The same cannot be said about JFrog, since they block our domain (and possibly others) from even signing up. This lack of openness ultimately hurts customers; many large organizations have multiple artifact management systems in place, and access to both systems would let us better support customers’ interoperability requirements.

Openness and transparency are core to who we are

: “Hide nothing, then there is nothing to hide.”

Openness and honesty, both in how we operate our business and how we communicate, are essential for building trust with customers and also how we work together as Cloudsmithers. Transparency is second nature for Cloudsmith; it’s how we make decisions, share information, and hold ourselves accountable.

We avoid that “lies, damned lies, and statistics” feeling when sharing information. We focus on facts, context, and clarity.

That’s why anyone can sign up for a Cloudsmith developer account - yes, even if you’re from JFrog - and experience our platform firsthand; no gatekeeping, no NDA. It’s why we share platform status and service issues, no matter how minor; it’s more important to share the small stuff than to stick to a claim of “flawless 100% uptime.”

Transparency isn’t just fluffy marketing - it’s how we operate, every day.

We believe in Community and Open Ecosystems

Security of the software supply chain depends on collaboration. From open standards to public registries, collaboration is how enterprises actually build software securely and at scale. We support open ecosystems because they accelerate innovation and benefit everyone.

Closed platforms and walled gardens are tempting to legacy software vendors like JFrog, but they inevitably lead to lock‑in and slow progress. Our approach is different: Cloudsmith is designed to integrate, not isolate. We recognize that we are the trusted control plane and data plane for software artifacts. To do that effectively means working alongside the tools and ecosystems our customers already rely on, rather than forcing a single‑vendor stack.

Competition pushes every company to deliver more value to customers. We welcome direct competition with JFrog because it helps us to improve our platform and our customer experience.

Artifact management is critical infrastructure. Software teams depend on us to build, secure, and deliver their products. Choosing an artifact management platform is a decision about who you trust, and who you want to work with for the next 5-10 years and beyond.

Cloudsmith’s growth has been built on long‑term partnerships. We understand our customers’ needs, deliver meaningful improvements, and act as a trusted partner as requirements evolve. That’s what real competition is about: 

Competition, transparency and building the future of the Software Supply Chain

Exploring AI and the future of the software supply chain

AI assistants will shape the future of the software supply chain, and today, we’re sharing a glimpse of a powerful idea in motion: 

 server that connects large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude directly to your software supply chain using the emerging 

Imagine managing policies, surfacing security insights, or orchestrating package workflows with a simple natural language prompt. No dashboards, no scripting, just a simple question or instruction that delivers the right end result. If this sounds interesting, you should 

This isn’t a launched product (yet), but it’s a clear signal of where we think Cloudsmith is headed: toward 

 that make it easier to control your software supply chain.

is a standard way to make information available to LLMs. Similar to an API, MCP provides a documented, standardized way for a client to integrate services from external sources.

MCP enables AI assistants to query and interact with software supply chain data, so it creates a foundation for smarter workflows and more accessible control over artifact management.

In essence, adding MCP capabilities to Cloudsmith offers up an entirely new interface to your software supply chain, with AI agents and LLMs working together to achieve your goals. We're exited to see MCP becoming a flexible new point of integration between our customers' third-party services and Cloudsmith.

MCP server demo

Our MCP prototype leverages Cloudsmith’s API-first architecture to provide programmatic access to developers through their AI assistant. Through standardized MCP requests, you can ask questions about your software supply chain or take safe, controlled actions - like managing policies or promoting packages - directly within Cloudsmith. This opens up conversational workflows with the Cloudsmith platform.

For example, you might ask your AI assistant to identify what package is trending up in usage month over month or see all of the versions of a particular package in use across your workspace. In the future, your AI assistant will be able to review your organization’s compliance and security requirements and recommend or create a set of policies in Cloudsmith’s Enterprise Policy Manager based on that input.

Building this prototype was a good reminder of a few fundamentals. First, an API-first foundation makes it easier to experiment, so it’s good that Cloudsmith is built truly API-first. Second, the data running through platforms like Cloudsmith can offer valuable insights when it’s made accessible to clients in lots of different ways. We’re giving developers and AI assistants simpler ways to ask questions, take actions, and get things done.

There’s still plenty to figure out, but MCP is already making artifact management and software supply chain management more intuitive and straightforward, especially at enterprise scale.

 for select customers and partners. If you're exploring the intersection of DevOps, AI, and supply chain security, we’d love to work with you. 

Prototyping an MCP Server

Your software artifacts are your intellectual property; that’s why Cloudsmith is built to put you in control. Cloudsmith provides a flexible, powerful permissions system and 

 to control authentication, team membership and manage your users' lifecycle.

Managing users across hundreds of applications and systems can be a painful process, though. And we want Cloudsmith to be the artifact management platform of choice for enterprise customers. So we are pleased to let you know that we are expanding on the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM) capabilities in Cloudsmith. By integrating Cloudsmith with your identity provider (IdP) via SCIM, you can automate provisioning and de-provisioning users in Cloudsmith, letting your IdP serve as your single point for managing user access in Cloudsmith.

What is the System for Cross-domain Identity Management (SCIM)?

SCIM, or System for Cross-domain Identity Management

, is an open standard designed to manage user identity information. SCIM communicates user identity data between IdPs such as 

, and service providers requiring user identity information (such as enterprise SaaS apps, like Cloudsmith). SCIM uses RESTful APIs to transfer user data between systems.

SAML is primarily used for single sign-on (SSO) authentication between applications and systems. SAML enables users to log in once to a single system, proving they are who they say they are, and then access multiple other systems without having to log in again.

Where SCIM differs is that it is API-based, not login-based. When changes to identities are made in the IdP, including create, update, and delete, they are automatically synced to the service providers (like Cloudsmith) according to the SCIM protocol. For end users, this means that they have seamless access to applications for which they’re assigned, with up-to-date profiles and permissions.

Get Early Access to SCIM on Cloudsmith Now

To demonstrate our commitment to providing enterprises with the control they need, we are offering early access to SCIM provisioning and de-provisioning capabilities. By participating in the early access program, you get an exclusive opportunity to explore these capabilities firsthand and shape the final release with your feedback.

To sign up for early access, please reach out to 

. We look forward to partnering with your enterprise on this journey of enhanced control and efficiency.

Thank you for choosing Cloudsmith as your trusted platform. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to empower enterprises with cloud-native artifact management.

Take control of user management with Cloudsmith's new SCIM capabilities

CircleCI, a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery service, 

 that they were investigating a security incident that impacted their platform and customers. CircleCI included in the disclosure recommended actions all customers should take in response to the incident.

Cloudsmith leverage CircleCI as an orchestrator for our build and deployment processes, and when we became aware of the incident, we immediately followed the recommended set of actions.

Cloudsmith already has a policy to ensure secrets are rotated regularly. However, directly after the disclosure of the CircleCI incident, we rotated every secret held within the secure contexts of our pipelines. All access tokens, OAuth tokens, SSH keys, and PGP keys contained within these contexts were rotated.

As an additional measure, we have consulted with audit logs within CircleCI, our SCM service, and our internal services to verify that no unauthorized access attempts were made at any time. This has also been cross-referenced with our observability platforms.

Cloudsmith Blog

Trust your software supply chain from ingestion to production

Extending supply chain governance to AI artifacts

Competition, transparency and building the future of the Software Supply Chain

Prototyping an MCP Server

Take control of user management with Cloudsmith's new SCIM capabilities

Cloudsmith's response to CircleCI security incident