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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.

Whether you are a seasoned computer user or new to the MS Office environment, we are sure you have some questions regarding Office 365. This webinar will help demystify the differences between Office 365 in the Cloud and on your PC. Find out when to use one over the other. Have you wondered when should you use OneDrive over SharePoint. Can you just use PowerBi Desktop or should you subscribe to the PowerBI Service? What is Delve? Is Flow a useful tool and how could you use it?

Explore how Skillsoft Global Knowledge, an award-winning training provider, upskills and reskills through high-quality training courses and certifications.

The PMP certification exam is changing but the PMBOK is not. Everyone planning to pursue their PMP certification in 2020 needs to know what is changing and how it will affect the way they prepare for the exam. In this session we will identify and explore the changes that PMI has announced to the PMP Certification Exam Blueprint, when and how the exam will be affected, and will look at a few examples of potential new questions. View the slide deck>

If you're running SharePoint 2007, learn what had changed in SharePoint 2013 for administrators and developers.

If you're running SharePoint 2010, learn how SharePoint 2013 is different and what you'll need to learn to deploy it effectively.

If you are upgrading to ESXi 5.1, there are some important facts that you should consider first. Upgrading involves many stages and processes that must be performed in a specific order. Many of these processes are one-way and do not provide a "back button." If you do not use care and consideration in your upgrade plan, you could possibly lose important data and configuration; and potentially even lose contact with your servers.

Adding a new computer to an Active Directory domain can be a disruptive process, particularly if that computer is part of a large, high-speed deployment. Djoin.exe is a command line tool that permits the joining of a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 computer to Active Dir...

The purpose of this Webinar is to introduce Apache Spark and its relevant integration with IBM SPSS Modeler. Why integrate? What type of benefits? We will review the integration process high level and advise which enhanced features to pay attention to, and common pitfalls to avoid.

Global Knowledge instructor Mark Baugher discusses how to use System Center 2012 Configuration Manager to report on installed software on computers.

This white paper describes a technique for defining processes called SIPOC (Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers). SIPOC provides a structured way to define the key elements of any process. SIPOC can be used as a means of defining any of the service management processes presented in ITIL® best practices. Furthermore, SIPOC can be used as the preliminary input into the more formal documentation of a process in one of many process design tools.

The methods we have used in the past to secure our networks won’t work for tomorrow’s networks. Cloud-based applications and multi-tenant environments require greater scalability, agility and control. Software-defined networking (SDN), such as that provided by VMware NSX, can deliver a new platform that transforms networking and provides for much more specific control of the security of your data and networked applications.  In this white paper, author Bill Ferguson describes the microsegmentation of security and illustrates how you can use NSX to provide security that works on today’s and tomorrow’s networks.

Occasionally as I'm teaching a Cisco training class, I get an idea for a blog post and it happened again this week. The Securing Networks with ASA Fundamentals curriculum is mostly based on the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM). While the class describes the us...

While the last few years have brought about many great advances in IT and network technology security and risk management have a critical point. There is a host of new concerns the IT security manager must be concerned with, including social networking, mobile, cloud, and information sharing. This has unleashed a new wave of change and potential risk. Risk management is required to deal with these emerging technologies and should provide the rationale for all information security activities within the organization. You can think of risk management as the process of ensuring that the impact of threats and exploited vulnerabilities is within acceptable limits at an acceptable cost. Risk management requires the use of countermeasures. Countermeasures can include any process that serves to reduce threats or vulnerabilities.

RTMT provides a set of canned views of both system resources and application counters that provide you with a snapshot of your environment right out of the box. Read on to learn how you can make RTMT even more helpful by customizing it to show you different views of your resources and CUCM environment.

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:

The IT Skills and Salary Report covers a lot in the published report, and that’s only the surface. Here are four snippets of AWS data that weren't included in the published report.

One of the advantages of vSphere is that you can move a virtual machine from one location to another, across servers, storage locations-even data centers. Physical servers don't have that ability and that can have many implications for disaster recovery, availability, and so forth. This white paper explains why migrations are useful, the methods that vSphere makes available for you to manually move a virtual machine (VM), and how vSphere can automate the process for you in various scenarios.

Many people believe that cloud computing requires server (or desktop) virtualization. But does it? We will look at using virtualization without cloud computing, cloud computing without virtualization, and then look at using both together. In each case, we'll look at where each deployment might be most useful, some use cases for it and some limitations.

Virtualization is an umbrella term that continues to evolve to include many different types that are used in many different ways in production environments. Originally virtualization was done by writing software and firmware code for physical equipment so that the physical equipment could run multiple jobs at once. With the success of VMware and its virtualization of x86 hardware, the term virtualization has grown to include not just virtualizing servers, but whole new areas of IT. This article is going to look at the origins of virtualization and how some of the historical development has spurred on today's virtualization. In addition, we will discuss different types of virtualization that are being utilized in the marketplace today and a listing of some of the leading vendors.

This article defines many of the most commonly used terms in the virtualization vocabulary.

Examine fifteen common myths surrounding virtualization, including many that prevent IT administrators (or their bosses) from getting the maximum value from virtualization. This paper is designed to be vendor-neutral; in other words, the basic concepts and advantages are the same whether you choose to use Citrix XenServer, VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, or one of the many Linux-based solutions. We'll break the reasons into three broad categories (Cost/ROI, Performance, and Other), allowing you to focus in on a specific area if desired, or you can review the entire white paper for a broader view.

There are many challenges that come to the forefront as you begin the process of virtualizing the data center and moving away from the current physical network setup.

While the recent trend towards cloud computing might make it seem like virtualization is new, it has existed in some form for many decades.

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.

In the rapidly evolving world of IT infrastructure and cloud computing, organisations are constantly looking for ways to transform and modernise their data centres. One of the leading solutions increasingly emerging in this regard is VMware Cloud Foundation. This powerful platform provides an integrated and automated infrastructure that enables companies to operate more efficiently, save costs and be more agile. In this article, we dive deeper into VMware Cloud Foundation and discuss training options to build the expertise needed.

VMware Horizon 6 was announced in April and began shipping in June 2014, bringing a more unified suite delivering more integration with infrastructure and cloud products and more simplicity for all devices. Along with the numerous updates across the Horizon suite, VMware has transitioned to a more traditional product licensing hierarchy. This paper explores the new licensing model and provides an overview of the new features associated with VMware Horizon 6.

In November of last year, Broadcom completed the acquisition of virtualization and cloud computing specialist VMware. Following the acquisition, VMware is now divided into four distinct divisions: VMware Cloud Foundation, Software-Defined Edge Application, Networking and Security, and a dedicated entity for the Tanzu offering, specifically for Kubernetes environments.

There are two types of virtual switches available using vSphere, the vSphere Standard Switch and the vSphere Distributed Switch. The vSphere Standard Switch (vSwitch or vSS) resides in and is manually configured and administered on each ESXi host. The vSphere Distributed Switch (dvSwitch or vDS) provides similar functionality but is centralized to vCenter Server and is more featured. This white paper will cover the vDS architecture as well as an overview of many of the different features that are exclusive to the vSphere Distributed Switch.

This vSphere Essentials white paper will give you a basic understanding of some of the concerns or planning points to consider as you get ready to deploy vSphere in your organization. This is a glimpse into some of the essential things to consider for implementing vSphere. This will focus on some of the basics that vSphere administrators run into when installing the latest features and not realizing they still have some older versions implemented.

Resource Pools are often misunderstood, disliked, and untrusted by vSphere Administrators. However, resource pools can be very useful tools for administrators who want to configure resource management without having to individually configure each VM. This leads to the administrator’s desire to explore the proper usage of resource pools.

There are many interesting new issues that seem to have come with the addition of voice and video to the data network. Most of the engineers that are now working on VoIP networks come from either a pure data network background or a traditional phone system background...

There are some common misconceptions on the part of some of my students as to how VPN sessions are established from either a remote location or remote user to the ASA firewall. In particular, a “gray area” seems to be when the attributes from the tunnel group are app...

In 2013, VMware announced VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN), which is VMware's native version of Software Defined Storage (SDS). It is simple, easy to setup and managed by user-defined policies. This paper explains VSAN, its basic requirements and how it works.

One of the most important steps in mastering a new technology is learning the associated terminology or vocabulary. In the IT field, this can be a very challenging step, as much of the terminology is often used inconsistently. This white paper defines the terminology associated with IT virtualization. It is mainly vendor-agnostic, but it does provide some vendor-specific terms, product names, and feature names used by VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft.

In the previous post, we discussed the need for VXLAN in the cloud along with the issues it solves. In this post, we will focus more on how VXLAN works.

In this white paper, you'll discover what SAP BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence can deliver. When it comes to accessing large amounts of data and then creating customized and sophisticated analytical reports, you'll see why Web Intelligence is a wise choice.

Cyber resilience is becoming a bigger issue for all organizations. But what does “good cyber resilience” look like? And how do you get there?

Cloud and virtualization technologies have spawned a whole ecosystem of applications. But like any powerful technology, they can be used for bad as well as good. This session reviews the top 10 most common mistakes made in cloud and virtualization security.

Thinking about getting ITIL certified? In this post, we cover the value of each ITIL certification and dive into survey results to determine whether ITIL certifications are worth it. The results are in!

Getting the best possible performance from a SQL server can become more complicated as you add more operations to your database.

Microsoft’s Excel program is a staple in many business environments, but very few people take full advantage of this tool. This webinar is a great opportunity to introduce yourself to formulas, data validation, pivot tables, and power query.  

Power BI is a business analytics solution that lets you visualize your data and share insights across your organization or embed them in your app or website. Connect to hundreds of data sources and bring your data to life with live dashboards and reports. Join us during this recorded webinar to see what Power BI can do for you and your organization.

One of the most used ways for hackers to attack an organization is through email phishing. From an attacker’s point of view, email attacks can be automated at scale with thousands of emails sent virtually for free.

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.

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

Scrum serves as a framework for the development of software and other products. It helps teams collaborate and provides a way to address challenges and changes in order to deliver a high value product. The Scrum Master promotes and supports the framework (Scrum). A Certified Scrum Master (CSM) helps everyone understand Scrum theory, practices, rules, and values.

Learn about the Amazon Web Services platform, products, and services. Gain on-demand access to compute, storage, and database services without upfront costs.

With blockchain constantly in the news, business leaders are not only asking themselves what it is but most importantly, what’s in it for me and my business. If you’ve asked those questions, this webinar is for you! In it you will not only learn what blockchain is, but understand its impact and potential for your business. We will demonstrate some of its immediate use cases in technology, business, and enterprise products and institutions.  

Global Knowledge Course Director and Lab Topology Architect Joey DeWiele, a specialist in Unified Communications, discusses Cisco Unity, Unity Connection & Unity Express.

Learn about Cloud Computing with AWS and the benefits AWS provides to hundreds of thousands of customers globally.

Driven by recent increases in cryptocurrency values, Cryptojacking is poised to be the center of conversation in 2018. It’s one of the latest innovations in hacking in which a victim’s computer is enlisted to mine cryptocurrency. Unlike ransomware, this attack steals processor cycles in an attempt to mine Monero and other currencies, typically without the user’s knowledge or consent. Watch this timely 1-hour webinar where we will discuss – A quick overview of cryptocurrencies. A walk-through of a typical attack. The economics of the attackers. Possible mitigation strategies to keep you and your organization safe. With miners trying to take advantage of the rising cryptocurrency industry, join us as we investigate this cyber-crime and learn how you can protect yourself and your organization. View our complete Cybersecurity curriculum for courses that help you build fundamental to advanced cybersecurity techniques, prepare for top industry-recognized certifications or master product-specific skills.

Networks are under attack as hackers try to access systems to compromise or steal sensitive data and information. Understand the threats posed by malware, ransomware and social engineering.

Project quality management is the process of determining the quality standards that are applicable to a project and devising a way to satisfy them. Learn more here.

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.

Organizations that plan for and conduct supplier management according to defined processes and boundaries are more likely to receive predictable, high-quality goods and services from their suppliers in a timely manner.

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.

Let's start with defining the job of a cloud architect. You are responsible for planning, designing, migrating, and implementing cloud-based infrastructures, but the effectiveness of these specialists is not guaranteed.

The cloud has been around for over a decade, but great cloud engineers are in short supply. What sets a great cloud engineer apart from simply a good one? Experience plays a big part, and the general expectation seems to be that you will become great by putting in your time. However, the truth is that to be a great cloud engineer you do not just slowly grow into your role. You actively aim for ways to improve both your skills and your approach to using technology. Here are three examples of what great cloud engineers do to be highly successful.

There are many questions you should ask before selecting your PaaS provider. Learn what you need to know in order to compare and contrast PaaS with the other offerings like IaaS and SaaS, and what they require in terms of setup and configuration. As with any decision involving IT infrastructure there are many variables that should be considered to ensure you find a solution that will fit your current and future needs, budget and support requirements.

There are many considerations in deciding on whether to provide Software as a Service (SaaS) to others or whether to become a consumer. This white paper will explore what questions and factors you should keep in mind as you seek to implement SaaS. Considerations include deciding how your application will be accessed, implementing disaster recovery, scheduling platform maintenance and upgrades, handling service outages and creating a security plan. This knowledge can be useful whether you are provider of SaaS applications or are planning to be a consumer using software for activities like accounting or project management.

The bad guys just keep getting better! No matter how much patching and tweaking we do, the bad guys' constantly changing tactics and techniques continue harming our networks, stealing and damaging data, and just generally screw things up. What motivates someone to do such terrible things in the first place? How have these hackers changed and improved? What kinds of attacks are popular now and why? In this hour-long webinar, security expert, former hacker and Global Knowledge instructor Phillip D. Shade will provide insight into understanding the latest hacking techniques, what the current threat landscape looks like, and suggested countermeasures to mitigate threats. He will include specific examples of the current threat landscape, including data mining, social engineering cyber threat terminology, man-in-the- middle attacks and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.

The advantage—and disadvantage—of IaaS cloud computing is complete control. The user is responsible for sizing, installing, and maintaining operating systems and applications, backing up the systems, etc. This enables the user to configure everything in an optimal way for the workloads that need to be accomplished, but it requires time and effort to determine how it should be set up, secured, etc. With the goal of providing a good place for you to start your IaaS implementation and highlighting some areas that you should plan for and design for, Global Knowledge instructor John Hales provides a review of IaaS, as well as insight into what you need to know before implementing IaaS. He also shares a laundry list of things to consider when implementing IaaS, including questions to ask yourself, your company and your potential cloud provider.

A career in Cybersecurity means being a lifelong learner. New attacks are constantly being invented, and cybersecurity engineers must respond to them in new ways. This video introduces a new supply chain attack, which provides a fascinating glimpse into the incredible skills of state sponsored professional hackers.

The SolarWinds cyberattack is one of the most sophisticated and broad cyberattacks in history and will likely be studied for years by cybersecurity researchers as a case study for a supply chain attack.

ITIL is generally not prescriptive. In reality, the CSI Register at any given organization might look significantly different than the example given in the CSI book. The fields given in this example are important. 

The way Microsoft certifies Azure skills has changed. In this recorded webinar, we’ll cover what these changes mean for your Azure Certification path.

What’s the difference between high availability and fault tolerance in VMware vSphere? This article elaborates on first configuring high availability and then layer on the fault tolerance capability. Learn more.

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.

I’d like to share some best practices for training BI administrators and architects in your organization. Because they will ultimately lead a major BI upgrade, administrators need training before a major project begins, not a few days or weeks before a go-live like other stakeholders. While there are many facets to upgrading your SAP BI system, I’m focusing on the need for BI architects and administrators to understand the BI4 platform’s new tools, new architecture and new monitoring capabilities.

According to Cisco marketing, Dynamic Multipoint VPN (DMVPN) “will lower capital and operation expenses, simplifies branch communications, reduces deployment complexity, and improves business resiliency.” Okay. But what is it, really, and why should we care?

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.

Now that the network is installed, each switch has a bridge ID number, and the root switch has been elected, the next step is for each switch to perform a calculation to determine the best link to the root switch. Each switch will do this by comparing the path cost for each link based on the speed. For paths that go through one or more other switches, the link costs are added. The switch compares this aggregate value to the other link costs to determine the best path to the root switch.

ITIL describes a service portfolio as a collection of the overall set of services managed by a service provider. A service portfolio describes a service provider’s boundaries and promises across all of the customers and market spaces it serves. I like to think of a service portfolio as describing the past, present, and future collection of services offered by a service provider. The figure below shows a high-level view of a service portfolio.

Learn about the five types of area networks.

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.

Modern quality management and project management are complementary. They both emphasize customer satisfaction and the underlying belief that quality leads to customer satisfaction. The main objective in quality management is making sure that the project meets the needs it was originally created to meet—nothing more, nothing less. In other words, to ensure quality, you must meet the needs of the stakeholder.

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.

The most obvious difference 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. Hubs are really just multi-port repeaters. They ignore the content of an Ethernet frame and simply resend every frame they receive out every interface on the hub. The challenge is that the Ethernet frames will show up at every device attached to a hub instead of just the intended destination (a security gap), and inbound frames often collide with outbound frames (a performance issue).