Resource Library

No matter which IT field you're working in, there are several skills that are useful for every IT professional to know. Here, seven experienced IT professionals working in the networking, programming, project management, and security fields, share what they believe a...

Aside from plenty of laughs, “Groundhog Day” delivers powerful messages about change, love and being a good person. Phil is unable to break the time loop until he totally changes who he is. Unless you’re as selfish and heartless as Phil, by making incremental changes over time you’ll bring success to your life and career.

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

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.

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.”

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+SHIFT+ESC is a faster way to access the task manager (you’re welcome), we have an IT prank for you.

ITIL® 4 Foundation Bridge is a new Global Knowledge course that addresses the specific needs of professionals who have already achieved the ITIL v3 Foundation certification and wish to upgrade to ITIL 4. 

Instructor Carol Kavalla talks about the advantages of taking a Cisco Data Center Unified Fabric Implementation class from Global Knowledge.

Anyone who’s managed switches over the years knows that the Spanning-tree protocol (STP) is both the best and worst thing to ever happen to the data center at layer 2 of the OSI model. On the plus side, the Spanning-tree protocol is what first allowed us to create redundant paths within our switching infrastructure, making our data center much more resilient to outages than ever before. Anyone who’s experienced a “broadcast storm” knows the full value of Spanning-tree in the traditional switching environment. We’ve also seen many improvements in Spanning-tree over the years to make it work faster and more efficiently (i.e. Rapid Spanning-tree, Bridge Assurance, and many others).

As we discussed previously, Cisco created the Nexus Operating System (NX-OS) to power its next-generation data-center switching platform. While this new OS shares many similarities to the original IOS, there are some definite differences that you need to be aware of as you begin using it.