Change Management , Technical Change Management , Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)

What is a Change Advisory Board (CAB)?

A cross-functional committee of stakeholders that reviews, evaluates, prioritizes, and approves/denies major infrastructure or software change requests before they reach production.

What is a Rollback / Backout Plan?

A pre-documented, step-by-step procedure designed to revert an IT environment back to its stable, pre-change state if a deployment or update fails.

What is a Standard (Pre-approved) Change?

A routine, low-risk, well-documented, and frequently repeated change (like a standard password reset or routine low-impact patch) that bypasses the full CAB review process.

What is the purpose of a Staging / Test Environment?

An isolated environment that mirrors production, used to deploy and thoroughly vet updates, patches, and code to catch breaking dependencies before touching live systems.

What is a Private Certificate Authority (CA)?

An internal trust anchor deployed by an organization to issue and manage digital certificates for internal systems and users without relying on a public, commercial CA.

What is the "Chain of Trust"?

The hierarchical path of digital certificates that links an end-entity certificate through intermediate certificates all the way back to the trusted root CA.

What is a Certificate Signing Request (CSR)?

A standardized text block generated on a server containing public key details and organizational info, which is submitted to a CA to request a digital certificate.

What is the difference between a .PEM/.CRT file and a .PFX/.P12 file?

.CRT/.PEM files contain the public certificate (and can be shared publicly), whereas .PFX/.P12 bundles contain the private key alongside the certificate and require strict password protection.

What is a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) vs. OCSP?

A CRL is a downloaded list of revoked certificate serial numbers. OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) provides real-time, instant verification of a certificate's revocation status without downloading a full list.

What is a Subject Alternative Name (SAN) extension?

A certificate attribute that allows multiple distinct domain names (e.g., example.com, shop.example.com) to be securely bound to a single digital certificate.