AACD™ Choices

Selecting AACD™

[1] The business case for automating the life cycle of the SSLs in your organization should be obvious. And in choosing to implement automation, it must be as secure as your current environment. So expedience must not compromise security.

In order for any product or system to be successfully adopted by any market, it must improve on current practices and must add real benefit. When considering IT security, achieving a balance between: automation; security; and control; is not simple. Yet for the product to succeed, it must do this in a way that is simple to use without undermining (or concealing) security risk.

The AACD™ Project

Before implementing AACD™ in your organization, you should understand the history of the AACD™ Project. This project was commissioned and approved by the Board on the basis that the required Certificate life cycle automation would:

These three principals then became the basis of the Board’s decision to form a ‘Black Project’ Team to work on the development of such a system. As a Black Project, only the Board members and those working directly on the development of the system were permitted to have any knowledge of the project at all. The name assigned to it was ‘The Vesuvius Project’ and, as it happens, it was aptly named after an enormous mountain with a history of volatility. The Vesuvius project was also enormous and volatile too.

The Vesuvius Project began in 2002 with the monumental task of the seemingly simple task of automating SSL and Digital Certificate [2] life cycles. Only if the project could prove it would meet the Board’s original objectives would it be approved for full scale development and publishing.

The seemingly innocuous brief was received with excitement and enthusiasm by the project team that subsequently spent four years before they reached a workable solution. Many ideas were combined, rejected, remodeled, reintroduced, reworked and modified before the result emerged.