Die Hard 5: The Developer Bites Back

Gartner’s latest tenets on the subject of lifecycle management (LM) appear to have channeled the relatively widely accepted concepts of LM towards an additional acronym: namely IAM - Identity & Access Management. No surprise then, to find that Gartner has a ‘summit’ in the pipeline to champion the cause of this very topic this summer.

According to Gartner, “Reputational risk can arise from retaliatory or predatory moves by former employees or competitors in an increasingly volatile market seeking to exploit vulnerabilities in an identity infrastructure.”

My question is short and simple. Does this really happen to a measurable degree? Do outgoing disgruntled employees walk off with anything more than a few bags of paper clips of and more than their fare share of Post-it notes?

Perhaps it’s because I watched Live Free of Die Hard last night on DVD – the cyber terrorist at large is a hacked off hacker who wants to get his own back on his former employers who form part of the military security services (or something like that) so he tries to shut down the entire city, country etc…

' Photo: Fox Movies Japan

Yes application lifecycle management has to feature a good deal of security provisioning and this is closely related to testing and debugging and system stability. But the lion’s share of traditional ALM is about hitting development project goals and functionality requirements.

Security and testing as a whole are often argued to be rather more ‘baked in’ elements of ALM. After all, Borland acquired Segue for precisely this reason when it began its move towards ALM credibility. To set the discipline apart on its own almost sounds like repacked technology for the sake of extra publicity. To promote an analyst seminar series even!