Our founder, Alan Robertson, is excited to announce he will be giving a keynote address at the Ohio Linux Fest on October 2nd, 2015. In addition, he’ll be giving a session talk on the Assimilation System Management Suite on October 3rd 2015.  Here’s an overview of the Assimilation talk.

Ohio Linux Fest Session Talk

How to Painlessly Discover What You Don’t Know – Before It Bites You Where It Hurts

The statistics on system management are alarming – 30% of all break-ins come through systems people have lost track of, 90% of all organizations have failures of services they aren’t monitoring, 80% of all organizations are unable to keep their systems in compliance after getting them there initially, and 30% admit that they rarely start monitoring until after they have a problem, 30% of all systems are doing nothing useful, and admins of larger sites often don’t know the inter-dependencies between systems, services, and switches.

The Assimilation System Management Suite helps you deal with these problems by creating a detailed graph database and driving audits, monitoring, and security policies from it in a way that scales like nothing else, and providing detailed data of what changed and what happened, and each piece relates to the other to help determine the root cause of an outage. This talk will give a demo, and will cover the usage, architecture, and future of the Assimilation project.

This talk is aimed at moderately experienced to advanced system engineers, administrators, IT architects, security professionals, and IT managers. Come learn how you can use the Assimilation Project to get X-ray vision into your infrastructure with near-zero configuration. If you are a security expert, you have the opportunity to contribute to and benefit from our set of best practice security rules.

The cybersecurity / infosec community has difficulties working together around breaches out of legal and public relations concerns, but can share best practices. The open source Assimilation Project compares system configurations against best practices in near-real-time. Our talk at OSCON 2015 talk gives an overview of the Assimilation System Management Suite, and outlines our efforts to include more security experts in our community and translate the results into open source code, creating “Security Best Practices As Code”.

Get a 20% discount signing up for OSCON 2015 using discount code ALANR20.

For a little more detail on the approach that we’ll cover in our OSCON 2015 talk, see our blog post announcing the IT Best Practices Community.

We’ll also have a BOF on Thursday evening at 7 PM in room E145. Be there or be square!!

A dirty little secret in IT is that we don’t always know everything we have, what our systems are doing or fully monitor them for correct operation or compliance with best practices. The Assimilation Project integrates continuous discovery and monitoring, creating a graph CMDB of your infrastructure and services and dependencies – scalably monitoring them with near-zero configuration. We are adding verification of compliance with best practices, particularly security best practices.  Come learn how to easily put your infrastructure knowledge in one place, monitor your systems, services and configurations, and automatically update it and compare it to best practices.

Security Best Practices as Code – Talk at Boulder DevOps

One of the big challenges with system management is keeping servers in compliance with security best practices. Commonly it’s done annually or quarterly through an audit process. These processes are incredibly time-consuming, can be confrontational, are often done by a sampling process, and can leave servers in a vulnerable state for months at a time. As organizations move to a continuous deployment model, security teams fall further and further behind. What if you could know immediately that a server was out of compliance, so you could correct it right away, and reduce the window of opportunity for attackers?

What if you could know immediately that a server was out of compliance, so you could correct it right away, and reduce the window of opportunity for attackers?

This talk will tell describe in detail how the Assimilation System Management Suite  is implementing this capability.

The Assimilation System Management Suite collects configuration information and incrementally keeps its configuration management database (CMDB) continually up to date. A good bit of this information is security-related. The next step in the evolution of the Assimilation Cybersecurity component is to automatically trigger comparisons of changed information in the CMDB against best practice rules – particularly security best practices. We will translate security best practices to code, and incrementally verify compliance in near-real-time. Because of the Assimilation architecture, this is remarkably easy to do efficiently.

The result of this will be that once you get systems into compliance they will tend to stay in compliance.

One of of the challenges is to collect best practice rules.  We’ve started that process by looking both at the NIST rules (courtesy of Leam Hall) and those from the Lynis open source project, and will be giving a talk on this process at OSCON 2015.

This talk will give an overview of the Assimilation Suite along with a few specific examples of a few best practice rules, a little about the rule collection process, and a couple of quick demos of the technology at work, and current status.

Slides from this talk are here: https://speakerdeck.com/ossalanr/security-best-practices-as-code-boulder-devops-april-2015

A dirty little secret in IT is that we don’t always know everything we have, what our systems are doing or fully monitor them. The Assimilation Project integrates continuous discovery and monitoring, creating a graph CMDB of your infrastructure and services – scalably monitoring them with near-zero configuration. Come learn how to easily put your infrastructure knowledge in one place, monitor your systems, services and configurations, and automatically update it and examine it against best practices.

Note that there are several university campus locations in Gent, so please make sure that you are going to the one just south of the Gent-Sint-Pieters railway station. If you type the location into Google, it will most likely take you to the incorrect campus, but if you type “BIB SchoonMeersen”, you should end up in the right place.

Presenting on the Assimilation Project – providing IT discovery and security compliance for IT.

I’ve been invited to give a keynote address at the Cascadia IT conference.

CasITConf 2015 is a gathering of professionals from the diverse IT (computer and network administration) community in the U.S. Pacific Northwest / British Columbia to learn, share ideas, and network. We go by many titles but everyone is invited: System administrators, network administrators, network engineers, Windows, Linux, Unix, DBAs, etc. The conference includes panels, presentations, invited speakers and keynotes, as well as training by top-notch experts. We expect attendance of 100-120 IT professionals from businesses and academic institutions from Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia.

The open source Assimilation Project provides integrated IT discovery and monitoring aimed at risk management and mitigation. It discovers systems, switches, services and dependencies. Discovery creates and updates a graph-based configuration management database (CMDB) of your infrastructure and services without setting off security alarms. This model includes services you aren’t monitoring and systems you’ve forgotten about. This is important since about 30% of outsider security breaches come through forgotten systems, and services you’re not monitoring can’t be properly managed. Monitoring is extremely scalable due to its radically distributed architecture. Because discovery informs monitoring, most monitoring doesn’t require any configuration.

This talk gives an overview of the Assimilation project – its capabilities, scalability and architecture, future plans and includes a demo of zero-configuration discovery and monitoring.