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An IT certification is a recognized benchmark mapped to a specific skill set based on standardized testing. A certification demonstrates your dedication, motivation and technical knowledge on a specific platform.

Look back at the some of the highest paying IT certifications of 2020.

Most Internet users don't realize that often a website or other service that seems slow to respond is actually working fine. Instead, it’s the resolution of DNS that is putting a glitch in your giddy up. Fortunately, there are several steps you can take to optimize your DNS to get better performance.

Learn how to boost your visibility on LinkedIn by listing your skills and certifications and leveraging the courses you’ve taken for professional development. This is especially important to catch the eyes of recruiters and when applying for jobs.

Learn about the five types of area networks.

An quick fundamental overview of layer two devices.   To learn more about this and similar topics, enroll in our exclusive Understanding Networking Fundamentals course.    

The key difference between hubs, switches and bridges is that hubs operate at Layer 1 of the OSI model, while bridges and switches work with MAC addresses at Layer 2 of the OSI model.

While Apple has created many fine things, they were yet to be created themselves when Xerox PARC scientists created Media Access Control addresses. These MAC addresses are 48 bits or 6 bytes long, so they are also known as MAC-48 or EUI-48. EUI stands for Extended Unique Identifier. It is written in hexadecimal characters as shown below:

As IT departments struggle with skills gaps and businesses attempt to recovery economically from the COVID-19 pandemic, these 10 IT skills are essential to drive success. Job roles in these areas pay well, but decision-makers are struggling to find qualified candidates. If you’re looking to make an IT skills investment or start a new career path this year, these are the areas to consider.

These technology job roles are proven to be essential during a crisis as enterprises scramble to change strategies and meet goals. The skills demonstrated by IT professionals in these 10 positions can make the difference between business success and failure, especially during a recession.

While cybersecurity remains the most popular certification category in our IT Skills and Salary Report, foundational-level certifications highlight our list of the most popular IT certifications of 2020. 

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.

For women in IT, advancing your career can be a challenge in itself. In the Global Knowledge 2019 IT Skills and Salary Report, only eight percent of senior- and executive-level IT professionals are women. We have pulled data from our research that sheds light on the job roles, skills, challenges, certifications and experience of women in tech who have progressed to the highest levels of an organization.

According to the Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report, women make up 16% of the tech workforce, and an even smaller percentage (8%) are at the senior or executive level. Here’s an overview of the most popular and most pursued certifications by women in tech.

IT organizations could benefit from degree deflation. By deemphasizing college degrees during the hiring process, an open pipeline to more candidates could emerge, leading to diminished skills gaps and potentially lower payroll.

Global Knowledge subject matter experts predict the top trends for 2020 in IT training, Microsoft, Cisco, AWS, cybersecurity and more.

Explore how IT decision-makers’ training views have changed since we first released our annual IT Skills and Salary Report 12 years ago. Once viewed as an expense, IT leadership now sees professional development as an investment. Even with shrinking budgets and a recent rise in skills gaps, the value of training is currently at an all-time high.

Looking ahead at new and emerging certifications provides insight into the areas deemed valuable in the IT industry. If you are an early adopter or in a position where you need to show that you have the bleeding-edge expertise of a technology, this list of recent and upcoming certifications is for you. 

Using Palo Alto Networks, PAN-OS, enterprises can build an IT Security Platform capable of delivering protection against all stages of the Cyber-Attack Lifecycle. From Reconnaissance to Act on Objective, the PAN-OS Single-Pass Parallel Processing (SP3) engine combines efficient throughput with maximum data protection. This recorded webinar will describe how the SP3 Architecture can increase network traffic visibility and enable you to control your environment.

In this informative webinar, you will learn about the popular and overlooked ways organizations and professionals can purchase training to become more resilient. 

In support of software-defined networking, Cisco has introduced several products to strengthen networks and meet the increased demand for flexible and cost-efficient solutions. The Cisco SDN solution in the data center is ACI. Outside the data center the primary Cisco solution is DNA.

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. 

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a solution that 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.

VMware vSphere: ICM 6.7 is the foundation for most other VMware technologies in the software-defined data center. The recent update from 6.5 brings important new features and enhancements.

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.

We asked for your top IT horror stories, and you delivered. Read the most unexpected and cringe-worthy IT nightmares from fellow IT professionals.

Technology trends such as these show no signs of abating, and IT administrators need to be prepared. Having a well-rounded and versatile team of IT practitioners is becoming increasingly necessary. In the following article, we examine five key skills that every IT department should have covered, regardless of the size of the company.

In the digital age, people and intellectual property have supplanted physical assets as the most important criteria for determining the value of an organization. It is the employees who develop the next big product or improve the practices, processes, services and internal culture that add significant value to an organization.

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.

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?

This article addresses non-technical skills you need to do to be a success in IT.

There are many career pitfalls in the IT field, especially if they are clearly outlined in an employee handbook.

IT professionals benefit from gaining skills in data analysis, cybersecurity, cloud computing, virtualization and hyperconvergence, and mobile app development.

Creativity is the “due diligence” of effective problem analysis. It is through creativity that the best possible solution for a problem is discovered. Without creativity, decisions are often one-dimensional, superficial, and near-sighted.

This webinar introduces the concept of resilient leadership. Leaders who can adapt not only support their organizations through ongoing change, but they also maintain high- performing and engaged teams in the process

What were the top paying IT and project management certifications for 2016? his article will help you answer both questions by providing a review of the 15 top-paying certifications.

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.

Business processes are complicated, and mapping them is not a trivial task. Modelling standards give us the tools to model complex processes, but they do not tell us the best way to approach a model or effectively use the tool. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor Rod Fage will guide you through the best way to develop a model, from determining the goal and scope of the process and measuring its effectiveness, to modelling the process in a hierarchical top-down approach, enabling business analyst to continuously validate the model.

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.

In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge course director Brian Egler will examine key new features of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 that demonstrate how it provides automatic end-to-end security, seamless generation of business analytics and elastic integration of data in the cloud.

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.

Despite advances in security, hackers continue to break through network defenses. In this hour-long webinar, network security specialist Catherine Paquet will examine the favorite methods and targets of hackers and will introduce you to the different categories of security technologies. In this foundational presentation, you will learn about the benefits of security solutions such as firewalls, VPNs, IPS, identity services and BYOD.

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 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).

Young adults unable to find work, employers unable to fill jobs, a recent GAO study that reported substantial declines in telecommunication expertise — there has been a lot of news about the pervasiveness of skills gaps, their causes, the actual impacts and what to do about them. It’s rather confusing, because the term “skills gaps” has been hijacked to politicize an extremely wide range of issues.

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.

Discover how the enhanced performance and reliability of Amazon Aurora will help AWS customers reduce performance bottlenecks in their applications. The relatively low cost of Aurora will tempt many customers to migrate workloads to this implementation of RDS.

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.

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.

Often, we don't have time to learn the reasons behind the standards we use. But learning what instigated a standard goes a long way toward not only understanding its importance, but also more easily and effectively applying it in your workplace. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor Keith Sorn will discuss common networking standards and explain how they were determined and why they are relevant. He will fill you in on things like why it's important to use proper color-coding standards when making cable and why the length limitations on wired cable are essential. He will also explain new standards, such as power over fiber.

In this video, you will learn about the latest version of ReportBuilder available in SQL Server 2008 R2.

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.

In this video, you'll learn how to utilize a great new feature of SQL Server 2008 called Policy Based Management for Multi-Server Management capabilities.

In this video, you will learn how to a use a new feature of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Office 2010 called PowerPivot for Self-Service Business Intelligence.

Most organizations quickly realize that knowledge management must be integrated with incident management in order to improve the quality of service and the efficiency of providing assisted service. What is not as quickly recognized is the value of integrating knowledge management with problem management.

Join Microsoft SQL Server expert Brian Egler for an hour-long webinar covering the key features and updates in the upcoming release of Microsoft SQL Server 2014! You will get a thorough review, along with demonstrations, of how SQL Server 2014 provides substantial improvements in performance, manageability, and availability that will make your job easier.

Your Microsoft SQL Server database often contains the most valuable information in your organization. Get tips for securing it properly and effectively in this free, information-packed webinar with Microsoft SQL Server expert Gidget Pryor. In just an hour, Gidget will demonstrate the layered security approach used by SQL Server. She will step you through the process and best practices of setting up logins, users, roles, schemas, and permissions, and she will review the security model changes that have taken place from SQL Server 2005 through SQL Server 2012. She will also review SQL Server 2012 training and certifications.

Global Knowledge Senior Business Skills instructor Samuel Brown covers tips for preparing and practicing for the PMP exam.

Database Management Systems (DBMS) have been monolithic structures with their own dedicated hardware, storage arrays, and consoles. Amazon Web Services (AWS) realized that while each company can use unique methods of collecting and using data, the actual processes of building the management infrastructure are almost always the same. AWS remedies DBMS problems with its Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

Global Knowledge Senior Business Skills instructor Samuel Brown covers tips for preparing and practicing for the PMP exam.

Instructor John Harmon explains subnetting using binary numbers and decimal conversions.

Instructor John Harmon continues his explanation of subnetting by showing how subnet masks can be used to sub-divide networks.

There are several Wireless LAN Standards, including b, g, and n, which exist in the 2.4 GHz band. These standards need around 20 MHz of radio frequency in order to transmit their signals. In this video, Ben Miller discusses how to pick access points and channels for optimal performance.

Answer? When it is flagged as a retransmission in Wireshark!

The driver behind 802.11n is MIMO, or multiple input multiple output. This video explains how MIMO works to double your channel speed by sending two or more data streams over the same channel.

Are you at a crossroads professionally or looking to start training for a new job? If so, you might want to consider pursuing network administration as a career. Network administrators are responsible for maintaining computer hardware and software systems that make up a computer network, including maintaining and monitoring active data networks, converged infrastructure networks, and related network equipment.

Global Knowledge Product Manager Tori Easterly discusses the benefits of our Understanding Networking Fundamentals course.

Multiplexing is the technology that is able to combine multiple communication signals together in order for them to traverse an otherwise single signal communication medium simultaneously. Multiplexing can be applied to both analog and digital signals. A benefit of using multiplexing, or muxing, is reducing the physical hardware cost for expensive dedicated network communication segments, such as copper or fiber cables.

In this video, you will learn how to a use a new feature of SQL Server 2008 called Transparent Data Encryption for enhanced security.

In this video, you will learn about the High Availability options in SQL Server 2008: Server Clustering, Database Mirroring, Log Shipping and Peer-to-Peer Replication.

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 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.

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.

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

One of the many useful features of tunneling is to carry non-IP traffic across an IP network, and this is still the case when dealing with IPv6 traffic. This transition mechanism makes use of a configured tunnel to transport IPv6 over a native IPv4 network, which may consist of two sites or more. Unlike the previous transition mechanisms, tunneling is not monolithic; while the basic principles may be similar, the operations are different. The following chart gives a breakdown of the current, major tunneling types in use, particularly in a Cisco environment:

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.