Lehman’s Laws of Software Evolution, developed in 1974 by an IBM processing researcher (1962-1972) asserts that unless work is done to mitigate complexity across software systems, they will naturally become more complex over time, and to maintain user satisfaction software functionality must be continually increased1. As true today as they were four decades ago, Lehman’s eight laws form the bedrock of software development and explain why CIOs are focused on transitioning app delivery to high velocity cloud native pipelines that accelerate innovation for users across business-critical apps.
To better understand executive perspectives on the move to modern app environments, we partnered with Forbes Insights to poll over 600 CIOs. Here’s a synopsis of what we discovered.
Multi-Cloud: The Prerequisite to Enterprise Growth
With most IT executive leaders acknowledging the need to “take a bold leap forward” while also accepting responsibility for accelerating changes within their orgs, the underlying message is clear. To drive competitive value across user experiences, digitization is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s imperative for enterprise growth. As such, CIOs are embracing multi-cloud for its ability to pair critical application workload requirements with the best public cloud service offerings for flexibility, scalability, and cost reductions that accelerate application delivery. What may be surprising is that improving security—a less hyped but critically important aspect of multi-cloud—ranks as the top benefit.
Why Centralized Application Security is the Top Multi-Cloud Benefit for CIOs
As zero-day and other threats increase alongside growing complexity in application delivery, and governments continue to require public-facing breach transparency, breaches have become opportunities for the public to up-level security awareness. In addition, with potential multi-million dollar losses at stake for any given attack,2 including costs associated with losing user trust, enterprise CIOs are hyperaware of catastrophic ramifications a breach can deliver. Balancing needs for security with needs for speed across app pipelines positions security as the number one benefit of multi-cloud.
Centralizing Security in a Multi-Cloud Estate
To reduce risk across IT configurations, attacks must be viewed as inevitable, and security must be baked-in, not added-on as an afterthought—or worse—added because a breach occurred. In a multi-cloud environment where attack surfaces can easily sprawl, security should not be left siloed at the cloud provider level, it should be centralized on a cloud control solution (CCS) to minimize risk. This enables dev, ops, and security teams to create checks at the technology level to ensure that data flowing through the infrastructure, no matter the cloud can be controlled, monitored, and protected through one unifying platform.
Discover how companies are dominating multi-cloud adoption and why, plus other CIO insights from our report: The CIO Of 2025: Start Modernizing Your App Pipeline Today
1. M. M. Lehman. “Programs, life cycles, and laws of software evolution.” Sept. 1980.
2. MIT Technology Review. “2021 has broken the record for zero-day hacking attacks.” Sept. 23, 2021
