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How do you measure the experience and knowledge of an IT professional? One way is through certifications. Earning any certification is a notable achievement, though not all certifications carry the same perceived worth.

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.

Have you been afraid to implement PowerShell in your environment because of security fears? The reality of PowerShell security doesn’t always match the perception. When compared to other scripting languages, PowerShell is actually more secure by default.

Despite a growing awareness and preparation for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, the overall arc of DDoS attacks is not weakening, but actually gaining more attention from the companies and personnel who have experienced these threats first-hand.

Google takes security to a whole new level thanks to their years of experience as one of the most popular targets on the internet for would-be hackers and denial of service bots. This led Google to build a sophisticated security infrastructure the likes of which few companies or organizations can claim. Google approaches security holistically and involves everything from the physical data centers, to the data pipelines between them, down to the training of each employee that is responsible for managing the infrastructure.

Consider how many financial transactions are performed on the Internet everyday. Protecting all this data is of upmost importance. Cryptography can be defined as the process of concealing the contents of a message from all except those who know the key. Cryptography can be used for many purposes, but there are two types of cryptographic algorithms you need to understand, symmetric and asymmetric. Symmetric uses a single key, whereas asymmetric uses two keys. What else is required to have a good understanding of cryptography? It’s important to start with an understanding of how cryptography relates to the basic foundations of security: authentication, integrity, confidentiality, and non-repudiation.

Quality, as we know it today, is an accumulation of several concepts that together create a comprehensive approach to quality. The views of quality, as described in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) and tested on the PMP® exam, focus primarily on the work of three major contributors: W. Edwards Deming, Joseph M. Juran and Philip B. Crosby.

Each year as the data from the Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Survey is put through the analysis process, certain trends become clearer. One of those is the prevalence of IT professionals who pursue certifications across multiple categories.

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.

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 question of how a project manager working in a functional or matrix organizational structure gets team members to perform is asked in almost every project management class I have taught.

Are you prepping for the PMP exam? What should you know about the impending new edition of A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge PMBOK® Guide before scheduling your examination?

The VMware NSX platform combines networking and security functionality directly in the hypervisor and it interoperable with a vast majority of VMware’s products. The platform provides a set of logical networking elements and services, using logical switching, routing, load balancing, VPN, firewall, etc. This product decouples network functionality from the physical devices.

Projects are a social endeavor. Traditional project management approaches have shied away from the social advantages a more agile project environment brings. By nature, we are storytelling, pattern seeking and social people. We need colocation to shine truly in a project environment.

You are estimating the total project cost using three points for cost estimates with a 95 percent confidence level. What is the cost estimate range if the estimated project cost is $120,000 and the standard deviation is $2,500?

You are the project manager on a construction project where you are deliberating between renting, leasing or purchasing a large piece of equipment. Equipment pricing: Rent at a cost of $2,500 per day; Lease for a 60 day period at $2,500 per day, with a 10% discount; Purchase at a price of $100,000. By looking at your project schedule, you have estimated that you will use the equipment about 50 to 60 days. Based only on price, which decision would you recommend?

Your organization and a seller have just agreed to a contract with a total cost of $150,000, an estimated profit of $10,000, buyer/seller sharing of 70/30 and a ceiling price of $170,000. What is the PTA (point of total assumption)? A. $170,000 B. $160,000 C. $164,2...

A strong event management process that is able to detect changes of state throughout an organization’s IT environment is a key aspect of a complete suite of service management processes. Event management ultimately helps an organization maintain control through an understanding of the state of things, and how the state of those things changes in an IT environment.

Event management, although theoretically different, is fundamentally what most IT organizations refer to as “monitoring.” Monitoring an organization’s environment to determine whether important assets are in the state they should be, and knowing when that state changes, is a very important activity that many organizations spend significant portions of their budget doing.

In this blog series, we'll get you up to speed on using the key tools listed in the PMBOK® Guide, including Decision Tree Diagrams.

In this blog series, we'll get you up to speed on using the key tools listed in the PMBOK® Guide. First up, Work Breakdown Structure (WBS).

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.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) planning is the process of developing the plans, processes and procedures to respond to the range of incidents. We start with understanding the essential functions of an organization, called Business Impact Analysis (BIA). In life, we set the same priorities: protection of family and friends, shelter, food and water and other life-giving essentials.

One of the main weapons of organized crime on the Internet is the use of junk email, also called spam. Hackers use spam for a number of purposes such as selling counterfeit products (medicines, particularly) to steal your personal or financial information, or to infect your computer with spyware and malware. This malicious software can then hijack your computer and your Internet connection to help propagate itself.

Pen testers beware. Whether you believe you know and understand all the potential legal issues, read on. First of all, a penetration test or “pen test” is a method that’s used to evaluate the security and/or vulnerabilities in a network. This test is normally conducted externally wherein the tester is attempting to hack a network or computer. Breaking into computers and networks is illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), and depending on your activities and other factors, other federal laws and state laws may be broken.

In this series, we are looking at six things that can trip up project managers. We’ve covered the hazards of overcommitting, how to provide feedback, the importance of taking responsibility, staying focused, and what leading from the front can actually look like. Finally, we’ll take a look at handling team input.

Have you ever Googled yourself to see how much of your personal information is online? In many cases it can be pretty scary and include things like your home address, phone number, likes, dislikes, etc. One young man searched for himself and found all of his banking information online. In that case it turned out to be a mistake by a bank employee, exposing the banking information of 86,000 customers.

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.

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

UFFA, which stands for “Use it, Flag it or Fix it, Add it,” is the responsibility of every support professional in the knowledge management process. It comes from the Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) methodology where knowledge management is based on collaboration and a shared ownership of the knowledge base. Let’s break it down.

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?

Now that we have looked at the similarities and differences between the first two steps of the military decision-making process (MDMP) and the project management processes from the planning process group that align with them, it’s time to take a look at the third ste...

Constant change in the technology landscape has been mirrored by the steady evolution of information security. The current information system environment is increasingly complex, comprising storage, servers, LANs/WANs, workstations, Unified Communications, Intranet, and Internet connections.

Dell SonicWALL's CSSA (Certified SonicWALL Security Administrator) exam is an open book, online certification exam that certifies a student’s understanding of the SonicOS Unified Threat Management (UTM) operating system. The exam tests a student’s network security knowledge, and their ability to use the GUI menu structure for configuration of standard network security scenarios.

For a project manager (PM) who has served as a military officer on a battalion or higher staff, the parallels between the military decision-making process (MDMP), the orders production process, and project management doctrine prescribed by the Project Management Institute (PMI) are difficult to ignore. Both the MDMP and the processes outlined in A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge—Fifth Edition (PMBOK® Guide) are iterative in nature, allow for the introduction of changes to the original plan, assign tasks and responsibilities, and involve the concept of managing the scope of the operation or project.

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.

As mentioned earlier, one of the most useful pieces of guidance that ITIL provides relates to the categorization of suppliers. ITIL describes four categories of suppliers:

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.

Risk is something we deal with on a daily basis. Living in New Jersey and having the occasional storm, I’ve recently performed my own risk assessment determining the value of certain assets and activities and made a decision on what I was willing to spend to reduce risk to what I perceived as an acceptable level. My management of risk was a rather simple case. Sure, in my revised business continuity plan for my home, I’ll make sure that I have more D cell batteries, have my garage door adjusted so it opens manually again, more food I can heat on a stove and that doesn’t rely on refrigeration, and finally I’ll consider a whole house gas generator that uses natural gas, which has always been available to power critical systems like the sump pump in my basement. What if, however, I was a really large business? One with lots of components and interdependencies that require a tight integration in order to succeed? How and where can a large volume of information necessary to management, business continuity, and disaster recovery be correlated and communicated to those individuals who, because of their roles and responsibilities, need to make the critical decisions regarding the management of risk?