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.

The Assimilation Project provides integrated IT discovery and monitoring aimed at risk management and mitigation.  It provides scalability into the 100K server range by fully and reliably distributing the work of discovery and monitoring.  The Assimilation system is essentially a Command Control and Intelligence (C2I) system for your data center.

This talk will give a brief overview of the Assimilation project, and provides detail in the unique protocols and algorithms we use to enable this high level of work distribution.  In addition we will touch on the security aspects of the protocol and importance of security to the project.