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This guide provides an overview of the Security+ certification, including who the certification is for, how to earn and maintain it, the positive impact that it will have on your career, and options for advancement following your Security+ certification.

This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the current Project Management Professional (PMP)® certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your PMP certification exam.

This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the current Google Certified Professional Cloud Architect certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your GCP certification exam.

This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the current Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Certified Data Engineer certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your GCP certification exam.

This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the current MCSE: Cloud Platform and Infrastructure certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your MCSE certification exam.

This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the current AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your AWS Architect certification exam.

This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the current CompTIA Cloud+ certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your CompTIA Cloud+ certification exam.

You have earned a CompTIA certification. The next step is to ensure that your certification remains current and valid. Some certifications are good for life, while others require renewal. Let’s look at what certifications require renewal, the options that you have for maintaining your certifications, and steps to get it done.

You know you need to invest in training, but how do you get the best return on investment (ROI) from your training dollars? To help you make smart training decisions, we've put together this guide, which illustrates some alternative and little-known payment options, the types of discounts and promotions available with training and a suggested list of courses that give you excellent value.

When a decision matters, there are certain steps you will want to follow. In this white paper, we provide guidelines for approaching decisions. The steps in this white paper are a series of interconnected techniques used in problem analysis and decision making.

Nearly every WebSphere administrator has desired a deeper understanding of how passwords are created, used, stored, and encrypted. Learn about the different types of passwords used inside of the WebSphere Application Server and the recovery plans to help restore your server when passwords go awry.

Managing the change of DataStage components can often become a test of wills. Picture fitting a square peg in a round hole, and you might start to get the idea. The complexity of what is required to promote components from one environment to another during the development, testing, and eventual implementation in the production environments, should be and is often a controlled activity.

End of year IT project spending has a higher chance of failure. Instead, invest your funds in the resources that manage and own the technology—your people. Learn how to choose the best IT training company for you at the last minute..

The process of subnetting is both a mathematical process and a network design process. Mathematics drives how subnets are calculated, identified, and assigned. The network design and requirements of the organization drive how many subnets are needed and how many hosts an individual subnet needs to support. Binary basics and IPv4 address structure were covered in part one of this two-part paper.

How can organizations in diverse industries continue to use familiar waterfall practices and at the same time be more agile? The answer is to use program management that is designed to be agile.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created a cloud definition that has been well-accepted across the IT industry. NIST was mandated to assist government agencies to adopt cloud computing for their IT operations. As part of their mandate, NIST created multiple working groups to define cloud computing, its architecture, and requirements. In this paper we explore the center core of NIST's cloud definition.

The amount of data being produced does not seem to show any sign of slowing; if anything, it may in fact be exceeding projected growth rates. As these absolute limitations on raw hardware capacity begin to be felt, the importance of looking at all of the aspects of a computing infrastructure in order to tackle the future's truly large-scale computing demands, is imperative. This white paper examines how IBM's initiatives like Linux, Cloud Manager with OpenStack and the OpenPower Foundation IBM are meeting this challenge.

Resource management is always an issue in any project, especially when the stakeholders from whom we need time have operational duties to perform.  If our requirements team was at our disposal 100 percent, always completed activities on target, and worked a full eight hour day without distraction or a loss of productivity, then estimating time would be simple. Here, we explore standard approaches to time estimation, the dangers of multi-tasking, and estimation alternatives, which consider work habits and productivity norms.

This paper proposes a unifying model for project plans. A distinction will be made between the outputs of project planning and the project plan itself. The significance of this distinction is to allow projects of all types to be described at a high level, in a common language, regardless of the type of analysis used to develop the plan.

Learn the ITIL® concepts of accountability, boundaries, and consistency (the ABCs) and discover how ITIL helps establish, manage, and maintain the ABCs.

Here's an introduction to encryption. What is it? Why do we need it? It's a complicated area, so we're here to help get your started. You'll understand the general function of three categories of mathematical ciphers: Symmetric, Asymmetric and Hashing. 

This Microsoft and Global Knowledge 1-hour webinar event gives you an overview to the different Microsoft solutions for managing security in your organization. Explore how Microsoft provides a holistic approach to security, helping you to protect identities, data, applications, and devices across on-premises, cloud, and mobile.

The CCNAX - CCNA Routing and Switching Boot Camp is a great option to obtain Cisco Routing and Switching skills while pursuing the CCNA Routing and Switching certification. 

Watch John Walter, Solution Architect for Red Hat's Training and Certification team as he discusses the emergence of radically simple Ansible automation and answers your questions.

In ACLs - Part 1 we learned the basics of access lists, including the facts that ACLs: Are created in global config mode End with an implicit “deny any” (which can be overridden) Must be placed into service somewhere to have any effect Thus, the commands: Rout...

Having discussed general ACL rules and syntax, let’s now turn to the differences between standard and extended ACLs. As you might recall, numbered ACLs fall into several ranges: 1 – 99: Standard IP 100 – 199: Extended IP 1300 - 1999: Standard IP (expanded rang...

As you may recall, we can use extended IP ACLs to filter packets based on source address, destination address, transport layer protocols, and other options, as follows: access-list 106 permit tcp host 1.2.3.4 host 5.6.7.8 eq telnet For a packet to be permitted by...

In any operational data center, it is critical to have the highest degree of visibility on network traffic for operations and application troubleshooting. In this white paper, we discuss how to achieve optimal visibility of any type of application traffic with Cisco Application Centric Architecture, or ACI.

Global Knowledge Course Director and Lab Topology Architect Joey DeWiele, a specialist in Unified Communications, explains the difference between our Cisco Unified Communications courses - ACUCW1 & ACUCW2.

When sending data end-to-end through a network, routers are used in internetworking to create a virtual network from one device to another, either locally or globally. Routers are configured to operate with most common network protocols. That means they know the form...

Watch this 1-hour recorded webinar and learn how to build and troubleshoot formulas and master advanced functions. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced user looking for some extra or new tips, this is a webinar you don’t want to miss. Part 1 of this 2 part series will show you how to – Understand Mathematical Operators Use AutoFunctions Use Relative and Absolute References Explore the Function Ribbon Use the Insert Function Wizard & Dialog Box Use Basic Text, Financial, Date, & Logical Functions Name and Use Ranges of Cells in Formulas Trace and Remove Trace Arrows Use a Watch Window View Part 2 here > Recommended Excel Courses: Microsoft Excel- Level 1/ Intro (2010, 2013, 2016)Microsoft Excel - Level 2 / Med (2010, 2013, 2016)Microsoft Excel 2010 - Level 3 / AdvancedMicrosoft Excel 2013 - Level 3 / AdvancedMicrosoft Excel 2016 - Level 3 / AdvancedPower BI Fundamentals for End Users-2016

Watch the second installment of this 2-part webinar series and learn how to build and troubleshoot even more formulas and advanced functions. Whether you are a beginner or an experienced user looking for some extra or new tips, this is a webinar you don’t want to miss. Part 2 part will show you how to – Array Formulas Subtotal Formulas More date and time functions Concatenate vs. Flash Fill Index and Match vs. VLookup Variations of the Round Function View Part 1 here > Recommended Excel Courses: Microsoft Excel- Level 1/ Intro (2010, 2013, 2016)Microsoft Excel - Level 2 / Med (2010, 2013, 2016)Microsoft Excel 2010 - Level 3 / AdvancedMicrosoft Excel 2013 - Level 3 / AdvancedMicrosoft Excel 2016 - Level 3 / AdvancedPower BI Fundamentals for End Users-2016

There is a reason why Agile training methods are becoming mainstream. They can work! Although every Agile practice is not necessarily appropriate for every organization, each practice has delivered real value to many organizations, and some Agile practices can be used by anyone!

There are several advantages to implementing a route-based VPN (a.k.a. tunnel interface VPN) instead of a site-to-site one. Learn more.

As organizations embark on agile initiatives, business analysts can serve a critical role in ensuring the success of those initiatives. This one-hour webinar will explore why business analysts embody core values and skills to thrive in an agile world. In this one-hour webinar, you will learn: Common myths about agile and business analysis, Agile roles for business analysts, BA skills for succeeding in an agile world, and Maximizing value – at the core of the BA role.

When Global Knowledge and ctc TrainCanada joined forces in August 2017, Global Knowledge added Concept Training, an innovative and industry-leading training methodology, to course deliveries. Going forward, when you take a Microsoft Office course with us, you’ll get to experience our Concept Training methodology. But what does that really mean?

What is Network Time Protocol (NTP)? Well, it’s a network protocol used to synchronize clocks between computing systems over a packet switched network. It’s been around since the mid-1980s and was developed by David Mills at the University of Delaware; it is one of the oldest protocols still around on the Internet. NTP replaced other time synchronization technologies that didn’t have some capabilities to adjust time based on location of the time source or time server relative to the receiver or adjusting to the variation of delay found on typical data networks.

What is the role of data, AI, and analytics in mitigating the risks of COVID-19 to the workplace or public space? COVID-19 represents new risks for organizations as workers return physically to their jobs, and as people return to public spaces. Based on the presenter’s recent interviews with several organizations, along with decades of experience delivering applied AI solutions, this talk reviews the latest thinking about how some organizations are tackling this difficult problem, and includes demonstrations of some new approaches. View the slide deck>

Businesses today are more dependent on technology than ever. And, more than ever, they're looking to IT for ways to improve employee productivity, customer service and innovation. The challenge is that in order to achieve results with technology, IT and the business have to work collaboratively. IT needs to be able to develop the right relationships and communicate with different stakeholders from a business perspective - not a technical one. As a result, the transformation of the IT department has become a top-level priority for many leading organizations. At the same time, business leaders need to strengthen their business technology IQ and play a more significant role in the governance of IT.

The subject of this week’s post was actually prompted by a question from a former colleague.  Soon after the PIX Firewall added support for IPSec Virtual Private Networks, a command was added to the command-line, sysopt connection permit-ipsec. This command was subse...

Getting a clear understanding of what Amazon Web Services (AWS) is and how it can help your business can be a daunting task. The depth and breadth of AWS is significant, comprising over 100 services in dozens of data centers located in 16 Regions throughout the globe (with five more in the works). They offer computing, storage, networking, deployment, management, and a host of "supporting" services like queues, serverless functions, and e-mail. There's a great chance that AWS has more than a few products to help you work faster, smarter, and more cost effectively. So, where should you start?

Amazon Web Services: An OverviewThere's a really good chance that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has more than a few products to help you work faster, smarter, and more cost effectively. After all, the depth and breadth of AWS is significant, comprising more than 30 services in dozens of data centers located in nine regions across the globe. They offer computing, storage, networking, deployment, management, and a host of supporting services, such as queues and email services. Getting a clear understanding of what AWS is and how it can help your business can be challenging. Never fear. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor and cloud and big data analyst Rich Morrow will help. He'll give an overview of AWS and its many benefits.

Learn the fundamentals of technology with Microsoft Technology Associate (MTA) training. Designed for business professionals who work with technology and IT professionals looking for cross-training, MTA courses provide a foundational technology education in topics such as networking, security, software development, Windows OS and more. Three days of intensive training will get you on the right track to working effectively in the ever-changing IT industry.

With Forrester Research declaring "Waterfall processes have become obstacles to speed, quality and predictability," and more than 85% of CIO's surveyed by CIO Magazine using or planning to pursue Agile practices in 2014, this one-hour webinar will explore the basics of Agile and why so many organizations are adopting Agile methods.

Amazon Redshift opens up enterprise data warehouse (EDW) capabilities to even the smallest of businesses, yet its costs, security, and flexibility also make it appealing to the largest of enterprises. It allows companies to easily and conveniently scale their EDW needs both up and down, and as a managed service, it allows your team to offload all of the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of building and maintaining an EDW. Its raw storage costs are about one-fifth to one-tenth of traditional in-house EDW, and AWS has taken great care to ensure its performance is still competitive with those in-house solutions. Before deciding to use Amazon Redshift, however, it's important to understand what it is and is not.

As cloud platforms provide ever greater infrastructure capability, automating and managing infrastructure is becoming critical to our strategy and process. Tooling environments are also heavily impacted. Tools like Terraform, configuration automation tools (Chef, Ansible, etc.) and cloud-native infrastructure solutions completely change cost models and workflows. This presentation is an introduction to infrastructure automation in the cloud, a few popular automation tools, and how to tie automation to larger cloud (and business) strategy.

AWS is an incredibly rich ecosystem of services and tools, some of which have security aspects baked in (like S3 SSE), and others that provide overarching security capabilities (like IAM and VPC) that apply to many services. With regard to data storage, operating system, and applications, security functions largely the same in the cloud or on-premises software. Customers can and should continue to follow best practices that have served them well in their own data centers.

In this hour-long webinar, IT service management expert Nasser El-Batal will introduce you to the TOGAF framework. You will learn about its business benefits, critical factors for implementation success, and TOGAF's relationship to and integration with other best practices.

Value stream mapping can be a dramatically transformational event – expanding empathy across teams, sharing points of view, and solving gaps in understanding which may be robbing everyone of productivity. This webinar will quickly equip attendees with a high-level understanding of value stream mapping and will teach practical tips on how to run a value stream mapping exercise within their teams and organizations.

The Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report is a window into the inner workings of IT departments, revealing insights and opinions held by professionals around the world. For 10 years, we have surveyed over 120,000 men and women in IT about the state of the industry. With a decade of data at our fingertips, we analyzed 10 years’ worth of reports and noticed four major trending areas: certifications, salaries, cloud computing and cybersecurity.

The term "life cycle" implies two things: that a process is perpetual and that the sequence of events is obligatory or uni-directional. There is no beginning or end to a life cycle and the sequence of events cannot change. A seed cannot go directly to being a mature plant nor revert back to the blossom stage.

Project procurement activities are often managed by specialists. By this I mean that the procurement department takes over responsibility for purchasing and contract management from the project manager. As a result of this separation of responsibilities, the steps and stages of procurement are often poorly understood by PMs. In this and the next few blog submissions, I will attempt to shed light on procurement activities and relate these activities to the PMI PMBOK.

For those that want to take their first steps towards Ansible adoption, Red Hat Training has developed several courses to teach you better ways to automate administrative tasks and use Red Hat Ansible Engine effectively, as well as how to leverage advanced features of Ansible to perform more complex tasks. This webinar will highlight the benefits to using Ansible to automate tasks across a variety of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Windows, cloud, and networking devices. View the slide deck>>

I recently was presented with the challenge of logging ALL of the pertinent connection, disconnection, and termination messages associated with the Cisco SSL AnyConnect client without overwhelming the syslog capture display with extraneous messages. This blog will br...

Constant change in the technology landscape has been mirrored by the steady evolution of information security. The current information system environment is increasingly complex, comprising storage, servers, LANs/WANs, workstations, Unified Communications, Intranet, and Internet connections.

The tools described in this white paper are essential PM tools. Tools that will best be used, regardless of the project, are the WBS, communication model, and the precedence diagram. The other tools will be needed depending on the project.

With Microsoft SQL Server 2016, you can distribute your data to the cloud using the Stretch Database feature to improve local access while allowing cloud access to large amounts of historical data. You can also provide transparent end-to-end security using Always Encrypted technology and track changes automatically through temporal data. Download this white paper to learn why these features and more make SQL Server 2016 Microsoft's most important release to date.

If you want to stay relevant as an IT professional, you have two choices: evolve your current skills or make a big change.

I attended a meeting this week with a customer of mine and a potential new vendor. The new vendor was there to pitch his configuration and setup service offerings for a specific ITSM toolset. My customer has already had one bad experience with an ITSM tool configuration vendor who promised one thing and delivered much less. He ended up with a tool that’s minimally used and not configured to match his business needs. He’s looking for a vendor that can understand his business needs and priorities and quickly help him get his tool configured and working in a short time frame. Then the topic of standard changes came up. My customer asked for examples of standard changes. The vendor responded, “Server reboots are an example of standard changes.”

As any network administrator will tell you, the ASA Security appliance (as well as its forerunner, the PIX) are capable of generating massive amounts of log messages, especially when the firewall/security appliance is set to log messages at debug level to the syslog...

As is sometimes the case, the idea for this article originated with a student question I received during one of the Securing Networks with ASA Fundamentals classes I have taught this summer. The course material mentions a simple scenario whereby IP Telephony traffic...

As is frequently the case these days, I get a brainstorm for an article during a Cisco Security training class I conduct. This summer I taught the Securing Networks with ASA Fundamentals class, which concentrates heavily on the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM)...

Ask any executive today about digital transformation and they’ll likely tell you about their organization’s plans to integrate cutting-edge technologies. 

If you’ve been wondering what are some good IT pranks for April Fools’ Day—or any other time of the year—this is the post for you. Whether you’re an IT pro with decades of experience or a noob who is about to learn that holding CTRL+SHIF...

You’ll be hearing a lot about AWS in Canada in 2017 as Canadian organizations are evaluating their options for moving to the cloud. Now is the time to get up to speed and find out what you and your organization need to know.

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This white paper explores the native AWS storage solutions, enabling you to deliver applications in the cloud in the most efficient, cost-effective, and secure manner. In terms of storage, it's important to understand the characteristics of each AWS storage option so that you can implement one or more AWS storage services to meet your needs. Often, you'll find that utilizing multiple storage options together will give you the best outcomes.

AWS Summits are free online and in-person events that unite the cloud computing community to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS.

Where the Azure Administrator is seen as a spider in the web of Microsoft cloud services is the Azure Architect playing the role of a generalist. They hold the umbrella of Azure Administration, Azure Development and Devops processes. Therefore they need to have advanced experience and knowledge of IT operations, including networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data platforms, and governance. And a professional in this role should manage how decisions in each area affect an overall solution. Every organisation with some cloud ambitions should have at least one of these Architects in their teams.

Learn about all of your options before choosing the path that works for our organization. Here we look at three of the common metrics questions and how ITIL® offers a balanced view for solving them. 

The Bash shell is a powerful tool for managing Linux servers. This video offers a number of tips and tricks for using Bash to help make working on the Linux command-line easier and faster. It explores time saving tools like tab completion, command history, and brace expasion as well as how to combine commands together to create powerful new tools using piping.

Understand how password length and complexity can make your passwords easy to guess or virtually impossible to bypass.

Cisco Switches and Routers running the Internet Operating System (IOS) have many things in common. Configuring these devices of course, is a skill that is sharpened the more you touch the device. During this post, our discussion will primarily focus on the basic comm...

RIP is a protocol that is used for routing IP networks. It was designed in the early 1980’s for communication between gateways (computers with two NIC’s). It is the oldest routing protocol used by the network industry and is considered by many to be inefficient or bo...

The OSI model is a conceptual tool used to discuss and describe network functions. The use of a standard reference model is essential to communicating ideas as well as creating new technologies. It is a good idea to be familiar with the OSI model, the features assigned to each layer, and examples of common protocols or technologies associated with the OSI layers.

In this post I’ll focus on a topic that’s mentioned in the Cisco FIREWALL training class but isn’t emphasized there or in the online Cisco ASA documentation. When configuring failover on a pair of ASA security appliances, a situation can arise in which network disruption occurs due to the secondary ASA in a failover pair becoming active first and then the primary comes online second. Both the documentation and the courseware point out that this causes the secondary (and active ASA) to swap its interface MAC addresses with those of the primary. Being naturally skeptical about this behavior, I decided to investigate. The rest of this post illustrates my confirmation of this phenomenon.

Diane Teare, Global Knowledge's Cisco Course Director, discusses the advantages to taking our CCNA Boot Camp.

In the fourth of his five-part series, Eric Strause explores the hardware and application benefits inherent in a cloud-based architecture.