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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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

The ITIL® framework continues to grow and adapt. With the release of ITIL® (Version 5), organizations can access enhanced guidance while building on their existing investments. This is not a reset. It is a thoughtful evolution designed to support the way teams work today and tomorrow.

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>>

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 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)...

Microsoft Copilot is an intelligent assistant integrated within Microsoft Teams, designed to help you automate routine tasks and manage your workload more effectively. By leveraging AI and machine learning, Copilot can handle repetitive processes, provide smart suggestions, and enhance team collaboration, all within the familiar Teams interface.

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

Skillsoft Global Knowledge partnered with the City of Madrid, AWS, and Experis to empower job seekers and set a new standard for digital skills in Europe.

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.

Get an AWS Skill Builder Subscription with Skillsoft Global Knowledge

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.

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.

Projects are a social endeavor. Traditional project management approaches have shied away from the social advantages a more agile project environment brings. By nature, we are storytelling, pattern seeking and social people. We need colocation to shine truly in a project environment.

For smaller companies, configuring a dial plan to account for variations in dialed numbers is often not a problem. However, companies that are larger and more global in nature encounter a number of issues when designing their dial plan approach.

In reviewing the list of best-paying jobs in IT, you’ll see some areas you might expect like cloud computing and other areas you probably didn’t, like business technology or enterprise infrastructure management. The top 10 functional areas are based on the 2016 IT Skills and Salary Survey conducted by Global Knowledge in October 2015. Note that all references to “average” represent the mean, not the median or other statistical measures.

In this article, we discuss how to achieve that optimal security approach in the data center with Cisco Application Centric Architecture, or ACI.

This webinar will look at Border Gateway Protocol and explore why we have the protocol; how its involved and how it works. We will look at how and where BGP is used in today’s networks and Internet. We will look at the basics of configuring it and some not so basic configurations.  

As I’ve stated before, I like Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). I think it’s an interesting protocol, and yes — it’s complicated, but I guess that part of why I like it. There are a lot of knobs to tweak in BGP, maybe too many, but that’s another post. Anyway, we are now running BGP version 4 and it has had extensions written that support more than just IPv4 unicast routing. We now have IPv4 multicast, IPv6 unicast and multicast, VPNv4, VPNv6, and a few others.

By December 2024, several key training courses will reach their end-of-life (EOL). While this may mark the end of an era for these offerings, it’s also a fresh opportunity to embrace the latest VMWare technologies and certifications that align with the ever-evolving IT landscape.

Every data center has unique hardware and software requirements that can pose significant management challenges to IT. Cloud utilization, virtualization, mobile device management, app development, security, and storage networking represent just a few of the management challenges facing IT today. Add to that the responsibility of providing the infrastructure for processing an exponential increase in data and making it available to an increasingly mobile workforce on a daily basis.

Learn more about the Blended Live delivery format from Global Knowledge.

During this Blockchain overview webinar we will discuss what blockchain is, how it can provide value, and how it is currently being used by organizations around the world to effect transformative organizational change. View the slide deck>  

IT organizations are increasingly being held accountable to bring digital value to the business and participate as a strategic partner. To this end, IT organizations must ensure they have the right skills at the right time to support the strategic direction of the business and contribute overall ROI. Deploying an IT skills framework provides an opportunity for IT organizations to determine their level of readiness by identifying where skill gaps exist.

Skillsoft Global Knowledge remains dedicated to providing extensive Broadcom VMware training

Explore how Azure provides easy-to-use services to help you get started with building Data and AI solutions. Learn about many areas of AI, including machine learning, and how many modern applications and services depend on predictive machine learning models. We will also talk about the fundamentals of database concepts in a cloud environment and how to build your foundational knowledge of cloud data services within Azure.

More challenging Microsoft certification exams require the demanding Microsoft boot camps at Global Knowledge. Rebuilt from the ground up to provide students all the study tools needed to master the Microsoft skills needed to certify and succeed.