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The cloud revolution is truly a revolution - the way we work, learn and even play is very different now than it was just 10 or 15 years and will probably be a lot more different in 10 or 15 years. With this in mind, let's look at 10 ways the cloud will (and to a large degree already has) changed the world.

Change is the order of the day, and if anything, the pace of business and technology change is accelerating. The business and customers are looking to IT service providers to be more responsive, delivering more frequent service changes with higher quality-resulting in services that deliver more value to the business. In order to continue to be relevant and of high value, ITIL must continue to benefit from other complementary best-practices for IT. DevOps, an approach that encourages improved communication, collaboration, and teamwork across development and operations, can have a positive influence in improving ITIL processes across the service life-cycle.

Cloud computing is a big force in IT today, and it isn't going away. In fact, cloud adoption is going up geometrically, both for end users (think apps on your phone or tablet) as well as for organizations of all sizes. In fact, many smaller organizations may not have any on-premises infrastructure at all, other than networking infrastructure to get connected to the cloud. With this transformation in IT, it behooves all of us in the industry to understand it and adapt or risk being out of a job, like punch card operators.

Security attacks have become more advanced; therefore, security solutions have needed to evolve to deal with those threats. Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire brings a new paradigm to the security landscape. No longer is security a one-time, instantaneous event. Security now is threat based, network cognizant, and continuous. All organizations, public and private, need to be aware not only of the constantly changing threat environment, but must be prepared to respond in kind.

A range of factors can influence the data center you choose. You should consider all of the factors listed in this white paper before deciding where to place your servers.

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.

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.

Global Knowledge instructor Doug Notini discusses the benefits of our FIREWALL 2.0 - Deploying Cisco ASA Firewall Solutions course.

SOA is all about architecture-after all, it's right there in the acronym-yet most organizations think it is about turning existing software components into web services. When you adopt SOA, remember that it is all about design and governing that design. It's about how you design your service interfaces, your services, your data model, and your business processes. It's about how you keep track of your services, how you control the design, definition, deployment, and distribution of your services and their artifacts, how you define a service contract and service level agreement for your service consumers, how to secure your services, and how to react when things go wrong with them.

Course director Jim Thomas explains how our custom labs, which utilize external hosts, ISR routers, and DMZ, provide a real-world environment for students.