Announcing the IT Best Practices Community

Cybersecurity best practices community

Computer security is problematic today, is expected to get worse for years to come. The security field is widely acknowledged to be suffering from a shortage of qualified security experts. Many people believe that significant improvements in automation are the only way to address this growing problem. Compared to the level of automation that system management has experienced in recent years, security has been estimated to be at least a decade behind.

Our IT Best Practices community was created to help support security automation efforts. We aim to collect, categorize and curate mechanically-verifiable best practices for servers, services and networking, in support of the idea of “best practices as code”.

Announcing Assimilation version 0.1.4

We are proud to announce the latest in our series of releases of the Assimilation software which will culminate in an incredibly useful production release. This release is eminently suitable for trials in an environment where the caveats are acceptable. We have quite a few pre-built Ubuntu packages, and a few CentOS/RHEL packages – so go forth, download and subdue the galaxy!

Welcome to Assimilation Systems Limited

I’m Alan Robertson, founder of Assimilation Systems Limited – this is my first blog post about the company. Let’s start this first post with a little history of the project and the company.

I founded the Assimilation Project back in 2010, as a result of thinking about a really big supercomputer (over 2 million cores) I was working with which had a very unusual networking architecture. It was a very cool and odd computer. Along the way, I puzzled over how one could effectively monitor it in the presence of this non-traditional networking topology – without using the built-in monitoring hardware (which would be like cheating). After a while, I realized I knew how to make monitoring on normal computers scale in a way that seemed really interesting. Being a techie at heart, I was really jazzed and decided I had to implement it…