Resource Library

It’s inevitable. At some point in your career, you’ll find yourself working alongside individuals who fall into the general category of “Difficult People.” The effects these people can have on an organization vary greatly but usually involve many problems for the team. This white paper describes some of the more common types of difficult people and provides you with tips on how to handle them.

Projects are often complex, made up of a large number of moving pieces. This brings numerous challenges. By using the three key steps mentioned in this white paper, your projects will run more smoothly from start to finish.

Critical thinking allows us to take control of our thinking rather than letting it become hijacked by convenience, mindset, assumptions and bias. This white paper will walk you through understanding the implications of inputs (data) and influences (bias) to the reasoning process. You will learn how to develop a questioning outlook and quality standards that will lead you to make more effective decisions.

What quality did the most influential leaders throughout history, such as Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher, all have in common? They were some of the greatest orators the world has ever known. Their communication skills were the tools with which they built up nations with strong foundations. They taught us that the most fundamental factor of success is without a doubt communication, and that strong communication is the pathway to strong leadership. Here you will find a breakdown of what makes an effective communicator and how you too can develop your leadership skills through communication.

The traditional network engineering model of configuring one device at a time simply doesn’t scale to the growing needs of today’s network. Cisco's intent-based networks and software-defined networking solutions will enable your organization to meet the demands of network programmability and automation. The result will be greater network agility to support new applications while complying with increasing security needs.

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.

Whether you are operating a home system, overseeing a small startup, or performing security governance for an enterprise, everyone can benefit from paying attention to security. This white paper provides a list of 10 security tools and tests that will help you check out suspicious issues and keep ahead of new risks and threats.

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. 

For 10 years, Global Knowledge has surveyed IT professionals and published the findings in our annual IT Skills and Salary Report. With topics ranging from top-paying certifications to most in-demand skills, our reports have consistently provided a deep examination of the attitudes and opinions held by IT professionals around the globe. With a decade of reporting at our fingertips, we decided it was an appropriate time to dissect the views of those making the decisions in the tech industry. What are their biggest challenges? How have their training opinions changed over time? How do their actions affect staff?

When designing a structured business analyst interview, it’s crucial to have a goal in mind, a clear set of questions planned, and an understanding of how those questions may deviate from the intended goal. An interview has an intended line of questioning; it may also have alternate lines of questioning and unanticipated paths where the interviewee has raised issues or answered questions in a way the business analyst had not considered or planned. In short, an interview is a social process.

A structured business analysis interview is much more than a conversation; it is a controlled event requiring attention to detail, cautious design, and a strong social foundation from which to build a trusting and lasting relationship.

Linking business analysis skills with the methods of The Open Group’s Architecture Framework, TOGAF®, facilitates stronger IT results that drive business value.

Structuring techniques are the foundation of decision making. They are to decision making what blueprints are to construction. There are a number of techniques that will quickly and easily improve the analysis of virtually any problem. This paper introduces some of the simplest and most effective structuring techniques including sorting, sequencing, placement, decision trees, and ranking.  

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.

The benefits of a RADIUS server are many. In addition to speed, you receive heightened security with user access monitoring, reporting and tracking functions and personalized restrictions. Setting it up costs less than $60 and this white paper walks you through each of the steps, settings, configurations and the equipment you will need.

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.

Often we let personal biases and other intuitive mental forces push us towards quick decisions. In contrast, good decision makers make the effort to really analyze issues. Instead learn how to become a critical thinker by separating facts from assumptions to make consistent, high-quality decisions.

CompTIA has raised the bar for Network+ candidates. The new certification exam has significant changes to the five "domains" or knowledge areas with new content related to security, cloud, data-center and operational concerns and troubleshooting. There is also a greater emphasis on wireless networking and VoIP. Use this white paper to help you gain an overview of what's new and what's different.

When properly utilized, VLANs and trunks provide flexibility, stability and ease of troubleshooting. This paper provides technical details about VLANs and trunks, along with design options at a basic to intermediate level. Recommendations and commands are included throughout.

Switches play a vital role in moving data from one device to another. Specifically, switches greatly improve network performance, compared to hubs, by providing dedicated bandwidth to each end device, supporting full-duplex connectivity, utilizing the MAC address table to make forwarding decisions, and utilizing ASICs and CAM tables to increase the rate at which frames can be processed.

This paper provides an overview of how to judge the rigor of one's decision making. It describes how anyone can make better (higher quality) decisions, in any situation.

This paper covers the configuration of IP Multicast with Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) including the basics of Multicast with the Group Encrypted Transport VPN (GETVPN).

The first big push toward implementation of IPv6 was mobile devices. Now, one of the driving forces is the Internet of Things. As the name implies, this means everything, including machine to machine communication (M2M).

Like it or not, Internet of Things (IoT) is upon us. There are a number of factors that will impact its adoption rate, and the inevitable privacy (or lack of) discussions will likely happen sooner than later. This is going to change the world as we know it, in many cases for the better. But we will need to keep an eye on the extent to which it invades our personal lives if it is going to be the positive force it has the potential to be.

The process of learning how to subnet IP addresses begins with understanding binary numbers and decimal conversions along with the basic structure of IPv4 addresses. This paper focuses on the mathematics of binary numbering and IP address structure.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is gaining momentum along with Software-Defined Networking (SDN). This paper examines the history of NFV and explores the prospects for networking to gradually evolve from a hardware-centric approach to a software-driven model. It concludes with an examination of future market implications and how NFV can help organizations to achieve their goals.

After a review of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and its close cousin Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), this white paper addresses three main deployment scenarios: SDN without deploying cloud computing, cloud computing without deploying SDN, and deploying cloud computing in conjunction with SDN. We'll look at use cases, when the approach makes sense, and any applicable limitations.

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is an internet signaling protocol, developed by the IETF (starting in 1996), for establishing, maintaining, and tearing down sessions between a variety of real-time media, including voice, video, and chat. SIP allows endpoints to locate other endpoints, whether stationary or mobile. SIP doesn't have to worry about transporting voice or video as Real Time Transport Protocol (RTP) takes care of that. It also relies on Session Description Protocol (SDP) to negotiate capabilities and codecs. SIP does not provide a Directory Service or Authentication, but it does work with services such as LDAP or RADIUS. SIP is only concerned with signaling. This white paper is going to look at the way SIP is used in the converged Unified Communications environment.

A local area network (LAN) provides a path of communication, allowing the delivery of packets of data, voice, or video originating from the sender (logical source address) to the receiver (logical destination address). Ethernet is the most common LAN used. As you start to learn about networking, remember that communication and the movement of large numbers, whether it is people, cars, mail, or network traffic, have a commonality. Everything you know and use in your daily life can be compared to the way traffic moves.

The OSI model is a conceptual tool used to discuss and describe network functions. The use of a standard reference model is essential to communicate ideas as well as create 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.

As with the adoption of any new technology, the move from IP version 4 to IP version 6 will take a number of years to complete. During that transition phase, various mechanisms will be necessary to continue support of the older protocol as the newer gains widespread momentum. In addition, there has been some evolution even within the availability of these mechanisms, some of which have already passed from general use into deprecated status. Network engineering professionals already proficient in the use of IPv6, as well as the available coexistence mechanisms, will undoubtedly stay in high demand throughout this process.

In 1998, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) released RFC 2460, outlining the technical specifications of IPv6, which addressed the shortcomings of the aging IPv4 protocol. As with any evolution of technology, new elements exist in the protocol that may seem strange and unfamiliar. This certainly includes address representation, space, and so forth, but also includes a number of different types of addresses as well. A subset of these new addressing types has corresponding types in IPv4, but many will seem significantly different. The purpose of this white paper is to examine addressing classifications in detail and outline their functions within the context of the protocol.

Negotiation is a dialogue intended to resolve disputes, to produce an agreement on courses of action, to bargain for individual or collective advantage, or to craft outcomes to satisfy various interests. It is the primary method of alternative dispute resolution. This white paper focuses primarily on the negotiation process, different negotiation styles, and the various elements of communication that affect the outcome, including: Negotiation Communications, Constructive Questioning, Communication Obstacles (and overcoming those obstacles), Challenging Negotiation Situations and "Traps," and, finally, completing Successful Negotiations, a.k.a. "Getting to Yes"

Subnetting is a complicated topic that has confused students for a very long time. However, subnetting is an important topic for many different certifications with various vendors, including Cisco. In the real world environment, people are used to just punching in the numbers in many of the free subnet calculators that are readily available on the internet. For exam purposes, you still have to do this in a very fast manner since many exams are time-based and you don't have the luxury of spending those precious minutes on any single question. This Cisco training whitepaper will solve some of those age-old and complicated subnetting puzzles.