Assimilation Systems Limited

I am excited and honored to have been selected to present at the 2016 DevOpsDaysRox (Rockies) conference on 21 April 2016 at 10:45. It will be more demo than talk, and is basically a 30 minute how-to on getting started hardening your servers using Assimilation Cybersecurity. This is quite a bit different from my usual talk – not enough time for a technical overview, but instead it’s concentrated on the kind of practical stuff you can go home and do yourself. Last year, I attended the first-ever DevOpsDays Rockies event, and learned a lot and met a bunch of great people. What a treat to get to present there this year!

2016 DevOpsDaysRox Assimilation Talk and Demo

Cybersecurity is in the news almost every day. It’s not just getting the attention of the technical folks in the trenches, it’s getting the attention in the boardroom. It’s also an area that the DevOps culture hasn’t spent as much attention on as we have on testing and automation. This talk is about how to make things better and keep them there – showing you how to get started in 15 minutes.

Making your systems more secure is a daunting task – the average system has something like 100 ways it’s out of step with hardening best practices. If you have 1000 systems, that means you have something like 100,000 problems – it’s overwhelming! There’s also understanding your attack surface (the ways an intruder can enter your systems) – how to understand and minimize it. This talk will cover these things:

• How to know what you need to do to harden your systems
• How to triage, manage and track the hardening process – and show your boss what great progress you’re making
• How to keep your systems hardened after you get there
• How to visualize and understand your attack surface

If you miss the talk (the conference is sold out!), you can see a demo on our web site, or a video of one our past technical talks (slides here), and  learn how to do many of the things I will cover in the talk (and more) from these blog posts:

• Fifteen Minutes Towards Better Security
• One Hour Towards Better Security
• A Half-Day Towards Better Security

Look forward to seeing you there!