Resource Library

To understand the difference between Ethernet II and 802.3, you first must know how Ethernet works. While Ethernet cables transmit data, their role is relatively simple compared to that of the Ethernet card — also referred to as an adapter. It’s within the function of this card that you find the differences between Ethernet II and 802.3.

Many organizations have already embarked on their Agile Transformation journey, yet despite having agile methodologies in place they have still not matured their competencies to the desired level. Still, there are some unicorns who have managed to master the process and are now delivering value faster and more efficiently. Frameworks like DevOps and Scrum help organizations stay ahead of the curve by facilitating cultural transformation, adoption of a lean mindset, and increased automation.

Every second of every day, data is being sent and received. Billions of data packets are processed by your company’s network every day. In fact, you received dozens of packets just to read this article, but the vast majority of us have no idea how this works. People have no clue as to what goes on behind the scenes to ensure data actually gets to the right device.

The 2021 revised and updated version CISSP (Certified Information System Security Practitioner) certification exam will be released on May 1, 2021. This new version of the popular CISSP exam will include a modest revision and re-organization of previously included topics, but will integrate a significant number of new topics.

Implementing business analysis (BA) in organizations needs to be done in a well-planned process. The three steps are contingent on the BA maturity of the organization, its vision for how BA will be used and the degree of executive sponsorship.

A quick 30 minute introduction to Business Analysis for those who are considering the field. This webinar looks at why the BA is essential to the business, what BAs do, and certification paths for Business Analysts. View the slide deck>

A quick 30 minute introduction to Business Analysis for those who are considering the field. This webinar looks at why the BA is essential to the business, what BAs do, and certification paths for Business Analysts. View the slide deck>

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!

Though there are several sources for agile certifications, the Project Management Institute (PMI)® Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® has established itself as the world’s fastest growing agile credential. The PMI-ACP certification formally recognizes your knowledge of agile principles and your skill with agile techniques.

Being able to play both roles of a project manager (PM) and a business analyst (BA) is a great skillset to have. Learn how to ensure your team gets what it needs in these two key roles so that you all can deliver successfully.

So you want to be more agile, but is it possible in a waterfall world? The short answer is yes! Waterfall can be combined with principles of agility. The trick is to recognize how agile practices lead to organizational agility. Any organization can become more agile, but there are trade-offs that need to be considered. In this hour-long webinar, instructor and presenter Brian Egan will help you understand how to make agile work within your organization. In it you will learn: Agile best practices Discover how organizations can be more agile Agile vs. Waterfall: Discuss the pros and cons of each Dispense the myth that agile can only be used for software development Watch this webinar today and learn how and why your organization should become more agile! Recommended Agile Project Management courses: Introduction to Agile Agile Project Management Transitioning from Waterfall to Agile PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP)® Boot Camp

Data center return on investment – which is measured by time to cost savings, time to revenue, time to break even, etc. – has proven more elusive than expected. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t attainable. To understand the genesis of the bad and ugly parts of data center ROI, we need to recognize the good parts and appreciate why so many companies are putting their faith in new and unfamiliar technologies.

In 2013, Cisco released their Software Defined Networking (SDN) solution for the data center known as Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). For many years, the networking industry has been asking for an approach to configuring networking devices more efficiently than having to individually configure each and every router and switch.

Whether you are just getting started in business analysis or want to gain a better understanding of certain aspects of business analysis, we have compiled a list of frequently used terms to help you get started.

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

Whether your project follows formal or informal project management, waterfall, or an iterative or Agile, making use of the daily stand-up meeting is an essential habit required for every self-organizing team. Stand-ups are a core practice and help us determine customer value, reinforce team structure, organize priorities, address uncertainty, remove impediments, and manage our time through the use of a personal Kanban. In this one-hour webinar, we will: Determine daily customer value with the three stand-up questions,  Investigate the use a Team Charter to build team structure and balance, Address daily uncertainty with a Risk Burndown, and Participate in a small exercise and create your own personal weekly and daily Kanban using exclusive cognitive techniques to manage the multitasking behaviors required of all of us.

This webinar focuses on assisting leaders who are determining whether Agile is right for their organization. In one hour, we will take you from the basic concepts of Agile methodology to understanding the process and what your role is as a leader. You will learn the challenges and benefits and how an Agile culture can fuel your teams and provide value for your customers faster.

This paper is a high level, moderately technical understanding of Hyper-Converged Infrastructures. IT managers, data center architects, and administrators alike may find this information helpful in their pursuit to simplify the data center and improve application performance.

Agile project management literally turns the world of managing projects upside down. The triple constraint is balanced in an unconventional way, the role of the matrix team coordinator is downplayed, and risk management can be built into the prioritization approach. So, what is left for the PM to do?

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.

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. In this paper, we explore standard approaches to time estimation, the dangers of multi-tasking, and estimation alternatives, which consider work habits and productivity norms.

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

How can organizations in diverse industries continue to use familiar waterfall practices and at the same time be more agile? The answer is to use program management that is designed to be agile.

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.

My most recent blog addressed whether PMP and CAPM boot camps are worth the time and effort. I concluded that for most exam writers, it really did make sense to buckle down and take advantage of all that a quality boot camp offers.

Cisco Internetwork Operating System (IOS) has been around since a little after the inception of Cisco Systems as a company. In 1984, Len and Sandy Bosack from Stanford University founded Cisco Systems with a small commercial gateway server. The first Cisco router that I touched was an Advanced Gateway Server (AGS), which was the first marketed product of the company. After this came the Mid-Range Gateway Server (MGS), the Compact Gateway Server (CGS) and later the Integrated Gateway Server (IGS) and AGS+. The first version of IOS that I touched was 8.2(7). The operating system was based on a Unix-based system and was designed as a monolithic operating system, meaning that processes are stacked and interrelated.

The past months have seen the release of both the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA)'s long-awaited A Guide to the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK® Guide) v3 and the Project Management Institute® (PMI®)'s Business Analysis for Practitioners. While both represent interesting developments in the field of business analysis, they also provide lots of information to process. There's no need to go it alone! Join Global Knowledge instructors Cheryl Lee and Adam McClellan for this complimentary, hour- long webinar to learn about the differences between the two guides, how both guides compare to the previous version of the BABOK ® Guide, and where all this might be going.

We build requirements at a quantum level to connect the vital elements, which are needed to realize a requirement. As we consider the relationships between the behaviors, actions, and responses, we begin to identify and associate the characteristics and conditions, which will drive and constrain the behaviors. Realizing a requirement means joining these elements together and noting them as elements of the requirement.

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.

Accessing cloud-based resources, whether they be IaaS/PaaS/SaaS-based, is very convenient. With a browser and Internet connection, you are up and running. No driving to your work office, no need to log into the corporate network. Just open up your web browser and go. This convenience, however, comes with a security risk. All of your business work is conducted over an insecure communication network. Unlike your office network, where the network link between you and the data center is under corporate control and is physically secure, the cloud access link is over the Internet.

Discover how Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) will revolutionize IT and change the way you think about network connectivity and perhaps even application development. This white paper is written for networking professionals but it may offer valuable insight for those in cross-functional roles such as DevOps, server virtualization, and data center management.

Business analysts have the responsibility to gather, analyze, and validate business and technical requirements for their projects, thus they need structured facilitation skills to manage requirements meetings and workshops. In this one hour webinar you will learn the most important things to remember when planning a facilitated workshop and what types of questions to ask when eliciting requirements.

The demand for skilled business analysis (BA) professionals is on the rise, and a great way to declare your expertise is with a BA certification. But which BA certification is right for you: PMI-PBA, CBAP or CCBA? Here is a look at the eligibility requirements and steps for obtaining each.

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.

The project manager (PM) and business analyst (BA) have to be key allies in the management of any project. That can be difficult when project work is duplicated because of the overlapping tasks defined by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) and the Project Management Institute (PMI®). Still, as long as roles are clearly defined and understood, the two can cooperate and collaborate, instead of competing. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor and PMP-certified project management expert Daniel Stober will explain how to delineate the roles.

Samuel Brown, project management instructor and consultant, has taught Global Knowledge courses for more than fifteen years. In this video clip, Samuel discusses Global Knowledge's unique and effective approach to helping students prepare for PMP certification.

The principles in this white paper help you introduce greater predictability into your own Agile requirements activities, both individually and across your organization. As you start to apply these ideas and pose these questions, you'll likely see certain patterns emerge that will help you establish your own set of practices that make Agile work for you.

Kirsten Lora, Global Knowledge Senior Product Director, explains why business analysts are essential to organizations and how our Business Analysis Essentials and Business Process Analysis courses can help them in these roles

Kirsten Lora, Global Knowledge Senior Product Director, explains the difference between our Business Analysis Essentials course and Business Process Analysis course.

The Open Group Architectural Framework (TOGAF) provides a structure for describing all transformational work within an enterprise. While TOGAF focuses on the role of an enterprise's architects, it also very much addresses the space in which business analysts (BAs) play. This can lead to role confusion, blurred deliverables, and duplicate work. In this one-hour webinar, business analysis expert and Global Knowledge instructor Adam McClellan will focus on those parts of TOGAF in which the business analyst is typically the most active, and he will outline how the analyst's work contributes to the broader architecture. He will also provide perspective for architects who work with BAs and for BAs interested in the architecture disciplines.

Whether you're a Project Manager or a Business Analyst, you can certainly relate to a situation where you've felt like your cohort on a project was from a completely different planet! This panel discussion webinar between our PM expert, Ori Schibi, and our BA expert, Cheryl Lee, will explore some of the misconceptions that each role has and learn how to play nicely with each other in the project world.

Communication is vital within projects and contributes significantly to project success. PMs and BAs have important—and different—roles. Let's take a look.

Effective requirements collection at the outset of the project is the key step that will ensure that the project manager can deliver what is actually expected. In this respect, the business analyst must become a key ally and advisor to the project manager. Most project managers are not trained business analysts, so taking advantage of the skill set that a business analyst can offer can greatly enhance the possibility of project success.

Organizations launch projects with the assumption that the new or improved solution will provide worthwhile benefits for stakeholders and a suitable return on investment. By understanding your business requirements you ensure that your teams actually deliver those benefits. Keeping user and functional requirements aligned with the business requirements is a key to successful solution delivery.

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

Agile is increasingly becoming the foundation for today's business world, and Business Analysts are essential for organizations and projects to achieve maximum success. Following a brief overview, Benjamin will tackle and dispel many of the common myths about Agile and then dig deeper into the true value Business Analysts hold for their organization. Join us for a look at the modern Business Analyst and their role in an Agile environment.

You know you need to invest in training, but how do you get the best return on investment (ROI) from your training dollars? To help you make smart training decisions, we've put together this guide, which illustrates some alternative and little-known payment options, the types of discounts and promotions available with training and a suggested list of courses that give you excellent value.

Organizations are moving strongly toward Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) access, bringing outsourced activities back in-house, and finding ways to make use of the growing amounts of data flowing in from many new sources such as social media. These factors create an increasing shift in required and desired skills showing up in IT departments. Hiring and salary surveys, such as the 2014 IT Skills and Salary Survey from Global Knowledge and Windows IP Pro, TEKsystems' 2014 Annual IT Forecast, Foote Research Group's 2014 IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index, Computerworld's annual Forecast survey, Robert Half Technology Survey, and information from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Futurestep, Mondo, GovLoop, and Dice have presented a developing picture of the IT skills that will be in demand in 2014. Here, in survey order, are the top 10 major skills and why they made the list.

Enterprise thinking, simply put, is the practice of considering the entire enterprise in decision-making, not just a given group or department. This style of thinking makes the organization both leaner and more agile—lean by reducing the waste and inefficiencies that come from blinkered and siloed thinking and agile by increasing everyone’s understanding of enterprise goals, vision, and functions.

Agile is a set of principles requiring a significant cultural shift, new paradigms in thinking and team organization. Over the years, Agile has become "productized" or in many cases "institutionalized", creating different flavours and levels of commitment among teams and organizations. Along the way, managers and team members have lost sight of Agile's principles and tried to enforce the use of certain tools and structure where they may not belong. In this one hour webinar, Perry McLeod will explain how tools such as use cases can be successful in an agile environment, provided the principles of agile are always active in the minds of the managers and the team members that are using them. Join Perry to determine whether or not making the cultural shift towards the use case method in an agile environment is the right move for you and your organization.

Enterprises, whether they are commercial, non-profit, or government entities, are operational organizations that operate through the execution of hundreds of processes. The quality of these processes affects every aspect of the enterprise and these processes are rarely static. Business Process Analysis (BPA) is the discipline of examining processes so that they may be changed to align with enterprise objectives.

That depends on their configurations. For example: While it makes very good sense to include redundant physical links in a network, connecting switches in loops, without taking the appropriate measures, will cause havoc on a network. Without the correct measures, a switch floods broadcast frames out all of its ports, causing serious problems for the network devices. The main problem is a broadcast storm where broadcast frames are flooded through every switch until all available bandwidth is used and all network devices have more inbound frames than they can process.

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.

“Twisted Pair” is another way to identify a network cabling solution that’s also called Unshielded Twisted Pair (UTP) and was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1881. Indoor business telephone applications use them in 25-pair bundles. In homes, they were down to four wires, but in networking we use them in 8-wire cables. By twisting the pairs at different rates (twists per foot), cable manufacturers can reduce the electromagnetic pulses coming from the cable while improving the cable’s ability to reject common electronic noise from the environment.

Here are some secrets, tips, and tricks for virtualizing your datacenter. We want to introduce some best practices for virtualization, while not being too biased towards one virtualization vendor or another. We'll use some common examples of products and tools that work with VMware's vSphere and Microsoft's Hyper-V, but with an eye toward virtualization in general, and not the specifics of any of the capable platforms that could be used). We will assume, however, that bare metal hypervisors, in other words virtualization platforms where the hyper visor is the OS, will be used as opposed to running a hypervisor on top of an existing general-purpose operating system (which is great in a lab, but terrible for data center projects).

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).

The Cisco UCS is truly a “unified” architecture that integrates three major datacenter technologies into a single, coherent system: Computing Network Storage Instead of being simply the next generation of blade servers, the Cisco UCS is an innova­tive architecture designed from scratch to be highly scalable, efficient, and powerful with one-third less infrastructure than traditional blade servers.

For us wireless folks that aren’t stellar routing and switching guys, one of the most daunting network tasks is integrating our WLAN infrastructure with the existing wired infrastructure and its services. Understanding wired design topics is pretty fundamental to installing or managing any network, so it really should be on our priority list to spruce up those skills. To give you a nudge on your journey, let’s talk about DHCP for wireless clients.

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.”

Organizations can find significant value in adopting Agile methodologies and techniques. Agile practices can help ensure meet customer expectations, deliver products on time, and create a motivated environment that is able to quickly adapt to change. This white paper explores 12 benefits of Agile development and management, explaining why you should consider incorporating Agile methodologies into your current standards and processes.