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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.”

As any network administrator will tell you, the ASA Security appliance (as well as its forerunner, the PIX) are capable of generating massive amounts of log messages, especially when the firewall/security appliance is set to log messages at debug level to the syslog...

As is sometimes the case, the idea for this article originated with a student question I received during one of the Securing Networks with ASA Fundamentals classes I have taught this summer. The course material mentions a simple scenario whereby IP Telephony traffic...

As is frequently the case these days, I get a brainstorm for an article during a Cisco Security training class I conduct. This summer I taught the Securing Networks with ASA Fundamentals class, which concentrates heavily on the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM)...

Ask any executive today about digital transformation and they’ll likely tell you about their organization’s plans to integrate cutting-edge technologies. 

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.

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AWS Summits are free online and in-person events that unite the cloud computing community to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS.

Where the Azure Administrator is seen as a spider in the web of Microsoft cloud services is the Azure Architect playing the role of a generalist. They hold the umbrella of Azure Administration, Azure Development and Devops processes. Therefore they need to have advanced experience and knowledge of IT operations, including networking, virtualization, identity, security, business continuity, disaster recovery, data platforms, and governance. And a professional in this role should manage how decisions in each area affect an overall solution. Every organisation with some cloud ambitions should have at least one of these Architects in their teams.

Learn about all of your options before choosing the path that works for our organization. Here we look at three of the common metrics questions and how ITIL® offers a balanced view for solving them.    

RIP is a protocol that is used for routing IP networks. It was designed in the early 1980’s for communication between gateways (computers with two NIC’s). It is the oldest routing protocol used by the network industry and is considered by many to be inefficient or bo...

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.

In this post I’ll focus on a topic that’s mentioned in the Cisco FIREWALL training class but isn’t emphasized there or in the online Cisco ASA documentation. When configuring failover on a pair of ASA security appliances, a situation can arise in which network disruption occurs due to the secondary ASA in a failover pair becoming active first and then the primary comes online second. Both the documentation and the courseware point out that this causes the secondary (and active ASA) to swap its interface MAC addresses with those of the primary. Being naturally skeptical about this behavior, I decided to investigate. The rest of this post illustrates my confirmation of this phenomenon.

In the fourth of his five-part series, Eric Strause explores the hardware and application benefits inherent in a cloud-based architecture.

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.

For smaller companies, configuring a dial plan to account for variations in dialed numbers is often not a problem. However, companies that are larger and more global in nature encounter a number of issues when designing their dial plan approach.

In reviewing the list of best-paying jobs in IT, you’ll see some areas you might expect like cloud computing and other areas you probably didn’t, like business technology or enterprise infrastructure management. The top 10 functional areas are based on the 2016 IT Skills and Salary Survey conducted by Global Knowledge in October 2015. Note that all references to “average” represent the mean, not the median or other statistical measures.

In this article, we discuss how to achieve that optimal security approach in the data center with Cisco Application Centric Architecture, or ACI.

As I’ve stated before, I like Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). I think it’s an interesting protocol, and yes — it’s complicated, but I guess that part of why I like it. There are a lot of knobs to tweak in BGP, maybe too many, but that’s another post. Anyway, we are now running BGP version 4 and it has had extensions written that support more than just IPv4 unicast routing. We now have IPv4 multicast, IPv6 unicast and multicast, VPNv4, VPNv6, and a few others.

Every data center has unique hardware and software requirements that can pose significant management challenges to IT. Cloud utilization, virtualization, mobile device management, app development, security, and storage networking represent just a few of the management challenges facing IT today. Add to that the responsibility of providing the infrastructure for processing an exponential increase in data and making it available to an increasingly mobile workforce on a daily basis.

ITIL® 4 Foundation Bridge is a new Global Knowledge course that addresses the specific needs of professionals who have already achieved the ITIL v3 Foundation certification and wish to upgrade to ITIL 4. 

Many companies have a so-called five-nines goal, meaning that the network needs to be available to the users at least 99.999% of the time. To achieve that goal, IT professionals must consider high availability in the network design, including both physical and logical redundancy.

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.

When integrating a Voice over IP (VoIP) system into an existing network it is very important to have a good understanding of how much bandwidth is utilized for each call on the network. For most people, just starting out the bandwidth calculations can be a very daunt...

Call Admission Control (CAC) is often times included as part of the same topic as Quality of Service (QoS), when in actuality CAC is a separate and complete topic itself. QoS is defined as traffic engineering on a packet switched network. This definition means movin...

I am a VMware Certified Instructor and every single time I teach, I get questions regarding certification. IT certifications always seem to be a controversial topic, and the question is always, "Why should I become certified?"

Early one morning, an engineer end user discovered that the Engineer servers were unreachable, and he didn’t know if he could reach the Internet. The administrator investigated the user’s PC with the IPCONFIG /ALL command and verified that the PC was a DHCP client, but it had received an address from the Accounting DHCP server, not the Engineering DHCP server.

This week we'll review the IPv4 Address Classes including subnet masks, examples of Class C, Class B, and Class A subnet masks, and planning IPv4 addresses.

The value of IT certifications has grown considerably over the last decade. Examine the evolution of certification trends, see the top-paying certifications and learn how decision-makers are struggling to hire certified employees.

This certification profile covers the job functions and titles held by the professionals who hold the certification, views on job security and satisfaction, CISSP salary information, along with other certifications held and tenure. The data is from Global Knowledge’s annual global IT Skills and Salary Report so you won't find it anywhere else.

The new Solution Specializations are designed to more closely align to the offers and solutions delivered by partners to their customers.

The Cisco Certified Network Professional Enterprise is built on the longstanding and well-recognized CCNP Routing and Switching. With the addition of evolving technologies, this makes the certification current and relevant. Having a vendor certification can be hit or miss, depending on the vendor, but with Cisco holding a major percentages of market share in the different technologies and implementations in the networking industry, having a CCNP Enterprise on your resume offers several advantages.

Cisco Learning Credits (CLCs) are prepaid training vouchers that make planning for your success easier when purchasing Cisco products and services.

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.

Cisco IP phones support a variety of different audio codecs. In this post, I will explain some of the differences and explain which versions of CUCM and the Cisco IP phones support the various audio codecs. Audio codecs are responsible for sampling human speech (a s...

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).

CISSP remains one of the most respected and sought-after cybersecurity certifications. With the most recent update released in May 2021, (ISC)2 has maintained the high bar it set to validate the knowledge and skills of senior cybersecurity managers.

Many certification roadmaps include (ISC)2’s CISSP (Certified Information System Security Practitioner) as a crucial cybersecurity certification to consider in a career and education plan. One example is the CompTIA IT Certification Roadmap, which places CISSP in the “Expert” column of the Information Security pathway. The CompTIA roadmap of IT certifications is not alone in recognizing the importance and value of the CISSP.

Cloud computing has risen from relative obscurity to the No. 1 tech area of interest in the world, according to the 2017 Global Knowledge IT Skills and Salary Report.

Get an insider’s take on 2017 cloud computing, DevOps, and Internet of Things (IoT) trends from an industry expert.

PRINCE2® has a storied heritage spanning over 30 years, 200 countries, and is universally applicable to any industry or type of project, irrespective of size or complexity. Building on this robust foundation and industry-wide recognition, the PRINCE2® 7 method brings a renewed focus on the flexibility and adaptability required for today's fast-paced, digital-centric project environments.

For every IT professional, there comes a point when the realization hits: technical skill will only get you so far. You may have your foot in the door (or the IT cave), but in order to advance your career and set yourself apart, you need to bolster a critical soft skill: learning effective communication skills for IT professionals

While most organizations have not yet fully (or in many cases even partially) adopted cloud computing, the trend is growing in all but the smallest businesses.

There’s a reason why one out of four certified IT professionals in North America hold at least one CompTIA certification. IT professionals who hold at least one certification have higher salaries, are more productive and generally are more satisfied in their job than their non-certified peers.

Depending on the switch vendor, the exact steps will vary on how to set up and configure VLANs on a switch. For the network design shown, the general process for setting up VLANs on the switch is:

Despite an organization's best efforts to prevent downtime and avoid compromises, failures will still happen from time to time. “I am convinced that there are only two types of companies: those that have been hacked, and those that will be,” said Robert Mueller, former FBI Director, in a statement. “Even that is merging into one category: those that have been hacked and will be again.” So, what is your organization doing about it? How do you plan for failures and security breaches?

Cryptography can be used for many purposes, but there are two types of cryptographic algorithms you need to understand: symmetric and asymmetric. Learn more from the experts at Global Knowledge.

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.

Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) includes a feature called "call throttling" that denies new call attempts when the system is in a state that may lead to delayed dial tone. The Real Time Monitoring Tool (RTMT) will generate a code yellow alert when call t...

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.

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.

This week’s post highlights some of the features and implementation specifics regarding the Datagram Transport Layer Service (DTLS) protocol used in Virtual Private Networks with the Cisco AnyConnect^® SSL client. I’ll provide some background as well as some screenshots and supported CLI commands.

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.

Windows 7 can be a good file server on very small workgroup networks. Although Windows 7 is limited to only 10 concurrent client connections as a file server it can do a good job making files accessible over a network. Windows 7 shares a great deal of code with Windo...

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.

With 2021 quickly approaching, you need to be ready for existing and new threats. If you want to secure your system from hackers, then you need to think like them. In 2020, we saw attacks on many companies such as Twitter, Experian South Africa, British Airlines, DigitalOcean, etc. These companies have trained security teams, but hackers continue to find ways exploit vulnerabilities.

Protecting your IT assets from threats is an essential part of business and personal digital activities. VPNs and firewalls are two commonly used security tools to help reduce risk while maintaining usability. When used in concert, IT communications are filtered and encrypted.

In spring 2020, the Cisco certification program went through a shake-up. Cisco announced a completely new program, including the Cisco Career certification. This certification allows IT professionals to demonstrate they have the right Cisco knowledge.

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:

Learn about earned value (EV) and how a project manager can use it to determine project progress.

This quick reference guide will highlight the various certification tracks to help you find your path through the EC-Council programs.

Discover the power of equipping yourself with superior cybersecurity skills to tackle evolving digital threats, ensuring a safer digital future.

Even in professionally managed network environments it is still possible for mistakes to happen. If an Active Directory object such as a user or computer account is accidentally deleted  network access will be lost. Worker productivity will decline until the account...

Occasionally I am asked to configure the ability to block calls based on Caller ID. Prior to Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) v8, the only way to block these calls was to configure voice translation rules and profiles on the gateway receiving the calls. This has changed in CUCM v8 with the introduction of an additional parameter in translation patterns: Route Next Hop By Calling Party Number.

Once an organization has categorized suppliers, one of the benefits that is quickly realized is an understanding of how supplier changes affect the buying organization and vice-versa. Changes are the modification, addition, or removal of something from the environment. The scope and scale of each change can be different. Change management covers everything from regular, low-risk, operational modifications all the way to significant organizational strategic shifts.

Both technologies, Ethernet and FC, satisfied the two conditions at that time, but there was a catch. Read more. 

There are two types of networks: those that have been hacked and those that will be. To defend against hacks, cyber professionals can benefit greatly from ethical hacking programs.

In the last two posts I discussed aspects of services in the context of some landscaping work that I’m having done. This is clearly what many people would call a “non-IT example.” I often use similar examples in my classes. However, I might initially describe an example that seems unrelated to IT, but will conclude with a challenge to students. That challenge is, “identify the IT in this example.” The truth of the matter is that most businesses these days are underpinned by some form of information technology. In fact, technology has become so ingrained into everyday services that often even the service providers themselves don’t realize how technology supports their business.

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.

A feature common to IPSec Virtual Private Network implementations throughout the Cisco product line is Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). This optional additional component is now a default supplied configuration setting with the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) I...

The ITIL® event management process defines three event types: informational, warning and exception. In this post, I will discuss the different event types and give real-world examples of each.

Exchange 2010 builds upon the significant changes to the transport that were made in Exchange 2007. In this article, I'll review the transport pipeline and routing components and list some of the new architectural and administrative enhancements to the Exchange 2010...

ITIL® 4 reflects new ways of working that have accompanied the digital revolution. Service Management, and ITIL in particular, is still an important toolset but you are now integrating its adoption and use with a vast array of new ways of working (DevOps, Agile, SIAM, Site Reliability Engineering). Since ITIL v3 was released in 2006, a large number of new and updated technologies (Cloud, Serverless Computing, Software-Defined Networking, AI, etc.) have emerged that now need managing. ITIL 4 reflects these changes. Here are some frequently asked questions about ITIL 4, as well as answers that explain what it entails, why we need it and how it differs from ITIL v3.

A gap analysis is a tool that ITIL recommends organizations use to compare their current state to some future desired state.

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.

Moving capabilities to a cloud provider such as Microsoft Azure is pretty straightforward. However, given the depth and breadth of service offerings provided by Azure, it’s easy to miss the product’s less obvious capabilities. If you're implementing a Microsoft Azure cloud platform, you'll want to consider these five services to save time, money, and your sanity.