One huge question that arises from the Oracle and SAP battle is not just the unfair and illegal practices that brings to mind the Virgin and British Airways “dirty tricks” dispute. But the serious question of ‘identity continuance’ – a term I would like to describe the phenomenon of employees accessing older data after the license expires and logging onto protected/private and public URLs using log-ins and passwords issued while employment with the issuing company.
It is certainly a very scary idea; and I too am well aware of employees leaving with the knowledge of public and private log-ins and passwords, subscriptions to highly expensive resource portals like (say for a journalist) gettyimages, AFP or livewire. It is especially forbidding in a scenario when most employees can even log on to their work email servers through a specific URL, and few, if any, use secure tunnels (VPNs or virtual private networks) to access it, whether they are at home or in their hotel rooms!
Perhaps linking the HR and IT department more closely might help stymie such efforts. However, insisting on something akin to digital signatures would be the only real method to stop illegal use of log-in ids as every time a ‘terminated’ user tries logging on the signature would identify the perpetrator from his unique personal access code. Though, fool-proof, is a something that is a term next to impossible; pun intended!
Remember, play safe ;-)
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