Ship to production
Demos expire. The only real proof is a system that runs under real load, with logs and a named owner.
03 · About
About
AI Transformation & Strategy Consultant. I came up through enterprise security vendors, then built infrastructure for cybersecurity startups.
I'm Keith Vaughan. I help organisations adopt AI without opening new security holes. I'm the founder of Cipher Projects and SumoSign.
I started in enterprise security. For eleven years at Dimension Data, now part of NTT, I ran a vendor portfolio worth more than $8 million a year in renewals: Check Point, Juniper, McAfee, Radware, and Cisco security licensing among them. I held those vendors to their SLAs and made the recommendations at renewal time.
The path then took a few turns, through US Navy port visits at Toll and data migration work for the Department of Defence. After that I moved into building. At Fifth Domain, a cybersecurity company, I led the cloud engineering team that moved the platform from GCP and VMware onto AWS, built the challenge labs and red-team environments, and took the company through AWS's Foundational Technical Review to partner status. I've kept building infrastructure and tools for cybersecurity startups since.
As companies started using AI, my work followed. Today I help teams decide where AI fits, test how secure their AI agents are, and build the systems those agents run on. That includes taking stock of the AI a company already uses and producing the evidence a board, lawyer, or auditor will ask for. I also work as a fractional CTO and invest in a few early-stage companies.
I mostly work with non-technical founders who need a serious technical partner, and with enterprise teams. I'm based in Canberra and have worked across Australia, Singapore and beyond for over fifteen years.
This site is a small personal archive. Writing is where I share ideas and arguments, and Work lists the companies I'm involved with. There are also plain fact files for AI tools that need an accurate summary of who I am.
Not affiliated with the British painter Keith Vaughan (1912–1977).
How I work
Operating principles
The rules I work by.
Private by default
If your data is what makes your company valuable, it stays inside your own systems. So do the tools that search it.
Leave you in control
When the work ends, you own the architecture, the automation, and accurate facts that AI tools can quote.
Facts, not hype
Lasting claims live in company facts, and they match what I can prove. Big ideas belong in the writing, where they are labelled as ideas.
Standards
Credentials
Kept current, because Defence and enterprise work expects it.
AWS Security Specialty
AWS Solutions Architect
AWS Developer
HashiCorp Terraform
CompTIA Linux+
ISO 27001 practice
ISO 42001 practice
In the room
Training
I run AI education events, AI company knowledge base training, and security training.
AI education events
I helped found a community that operates meetups across South East Asia for the AI community to meet and learn together.
AI company knowledge base training
You spend the day building a company knowledge base. In the morning you decide which source it reads, who may see it, and the one question the team will ask. In the afternoon you connect a CRM and the product documents and ship one shared skill. The day is written up on the Cipher Projects training page.
Security training
For teams putting AI into production, I teach it under the same rule as the rest of the work, so the rollout does not open a new hole.