Just the fact that they didn't have a way to record and verify whether the deployment was done properly boggles my mind. When I worked at a bank we had package management to do deployments, a separate tool for taking inventory of installed software (in case of users managing to sneak third party programs on to their system), and on top of that a web framework for tracking milestones during projects that allowed for manual entry by technicians and automated input from scripts so tasks that had to be done by hand like replacing hardware could be coordinated with build scripts and management could monitor the whole thing from a dashboard.
Wow! Bookmarking that one. What a great cautionary tale both for developers and devops. I may well need to use that as a teaching aide. Though a security principle, I cannot tell you how many times I have to point of the need for defense in depth in the design of software.
http://dougseven.com/2014/04/17/knightmare-a-devops-cautiona...