Finance built a GDPR request tracker, ironically unsecured

“The budget expires this week.”— Finance Business Partner

Reason:

Mainly because the CEO found the one button that does not work. With a logo generated at 09:00.

Built by:

Sofia, a warehouse supervisor

Build time:

5 hours 52 minutes

Built with:

a no-code builder on a personal account

Database:

Redis, but used permanently

Authentication:

the password is stored in a spreadsheet called passwords.xlsx

Deployment:

running on a laptop with 11% battery

Responsible:

an intern whose contract ended in May

Documentation:

a Confluence page marked "draft", last edited 209 days ago

Security situation:

it logs full customer records to the console

Future disaster:

It will be replaced by an Excel file during the migration.

Age: 2.9 years · originally expected to last 14 days · 5 owners so far · survived 3 reorganisations · last meaningful change 823 days ago · original builder left 266 days ago

Rated common mostly because: 51% chance of becoming business critical, alive 76x longer than intended, 44 users.