Managing the Death Star’s 3D Data: Where the Empire went wrong

Just because it happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away doesn’t mean we can’t learn some valuable lessons in protecting our intellectual property (IP).  As the CIO (Chief Inquisition Officer) of Galactic Empire Manufacturing (wholly-owned subsidiary of Galactic Empire), it is my job to perform a complete post-mortem of the now defunct “Death Star 1.0” initiative. 

Let’s do a quick recap for those of you who didn’t bother to do the required reading.

1. We successfully recruited (coerced) Galen Erso into being the prime designer for the Death Star by eliminating his other responsibilities (e.g., being a husband and father)
2. Galen secretly built a vulnerability into the Death Star to prevent its use for galactic domination
3. Death Star schematics were stolen by dirty, rotten Rebel forces who identified the vulnerability - a flaw in the reactor that could be exploited by a small, 2 meter exhaust port, unprotected by shielding  
4. Lord Vader’s bratty kid went from bullseyeing womp rats to blowing up moon-sized weapons with a well-placed proton torpedo that reached the main reactor and destroyed the space station

Alrighty, so after many thorough interviews (aka interrogations) with surviving team members we’ve identified quite a number of mistakes that led to all of these breaches in security.  It’s all about how poorly we managed our most sensitive IP - the 3D CAD and PLM design data for the Death Star!

Post-Mortem Analysis

First let’s discuss the engineering and design process.  Galen was a brilliant engineer, but who the heck thought it was a good idea to let him make all the design decisions without any oversight?  (Rhetorical question - we know it was Wilhuff Tarkin who was great at blowing up Alderaan, but not so great at project management). C’mon people, we killed his wife and separated him from his daughter!  Did nobody think that maybe - just maybe - he wasn’t the most loyal employee on staff?? 

With further digging, I’ve learned of other technical challenges that likely led to this disappointing outcome:

• It’s hard to share 3D data beyond engineering because it requires expensive and powerful hardware and software just to load and visualize the 3D models. Apparently the Empire prioritized budget spend on cloning stormtroopers and building backup Death Star’s over simple governance best practices.
• Side note: In order to collect component supplier RFQ responses from manufacturing slave planets nearby, we were smart enough to break up the model into smaller parts so no one supplier saw the Death Star in its entirety, but this was apparently a very manual and time consuming process.  It seems we could have completed the Death Star and ‘gone to market’ destroying Rebel planets sooner if we streamlined this supplier collaboration process.

Second, let’s talk about the security of the 3D model itself.  The Rebels were able to access the data and download the entire massive model onto a physical data card! Whatever happened to Zero Trust security people? After that, the Rebels simply had to deactivate the planetary shield allowing transmission of the schematic to their ship.  Another single point of failure!  And then this entire model was simply loaded into a random R2 unit that found its way into the Rebel HQ? Why was it so easy to access the entire 3D model of the Death Star? 

I’m not even emotionally ready to discuss the destruction of the second Death Star during the Battle of Endor. I get that it was important to the Emperor to have the laser fully functional right away, but to skimp on shielding as a result?  The on-planet shielding was easily destroyed by a few Rebels and a bunch of Teddy bears - c’mon people! 

Recommendations for Death Star 3.0

Clearly the old way of managing, collaborating, and securing our critical 3D data is no longer working.  We need a new approach, and thankfully I’ve found one: cloud-based 3D visualization software!

This innovative technology offers:

• Zero installations. Everything is in the cloud.  No, not the Cloud City on Bespin. We’re no longer on speaking terms with the traitorous Lando Calrissian.  
• No files.  Clearly having access to actual files got us into this mess in the first place.  This new technology streams context-aware pixels, not part files.  So our IP is always under our control - and not available to be downloaded by any random Rebel walking by!
• Device agnostic.  No more complaints about expensive hardware - the entire 3D model can be streamed on even the lowest powered devices used by any of our station personnel.
• Massive model support.  Unlike other 3D visualization tools out there, this new technology allows us to fully interact with the visualization of even the largest 3D models.  And yes, the Death Star would be considered a massive model folks!

Our spies have discovered that Vertex Software on Earth has created such a technology.  We fear that they may be Rebel sympathizers, so we need to approach cautiously.