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 IT organizations manage and reduce complexity and transform security compliance from high drama to teachable moments.

More specifically, we accomplish this by creating a detailed graph database and driving audits, monitoring, and security policies from it in a way that requires near-zero configuration, that scales like nothing else, and provides detailed data of what changed and what happened, and how each piece relates to the other to help determine the root cause of an outage.

We find configurations that are inconsistent with security best practices within a few minutes of them being created. This allows rational, adult discussions to take place while everyone still remembers what was done, and why it was done - promoting learning and dramatically lowering stress compared to the typical way finding these issues by an auditor, or an intruder.

This talk will give a demo, and will cover the usage, architecture, and future of the Assimilation project.  It is aimed at 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 remember the NCAR talk from 2013, you'll find that lots has changed and we've made great progress.