Resource Library

In this report, I've reviewed the 15 most popular certifications according to our more than 12,000 North American respondents to our annual IT Skills and Salary Survey. For each certification, you'll find a brief description, the average salary, and some insight into why it is popular.

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.

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).

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.

The technologies examined reduce operational expenses (OpEx), not capital expenses (CapEx) that has traditionally been the focus of virtualization. Many companies implemented virtualization with the goal of saving money in the form of fewer servers to buy with a side benefit of reducing the footprint of the servers and lowering the required power and cooling. Most of the savings were in capital, but do not expect the same with many of the technologies listed here, because some may even require some additional capital expenditures, at least for software, in order to save on the day-to-day operations of IT. The bigger cost in running an IT department is in the OpEx category anyway, so savings there are recurring.

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.

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.

With the onset of the Digital Age, IT professionals today are hit with a tsunami of changes! "By 2018, adoption of mobile, social, cloud, analytics will redefine 90% of IT roles" according to IDC 2014 Predictions: CIO Agenda. Large organizations are eliminating silos. Small and medium organizations are outsourcing technology services. Digital natives have entered the workforce. New roles will emerge as new ways of doing business are introduced and as old technology fades away. Today's IT professionals must adapt, and a new set of skills is in order. Join Pranav Shah, Manager of Information Technology and Security at Sony Canada, and Pam Maguire, Business Development Manager, Global Knowledge, for a 60 minute webinar on how to future-proof your IT career in the Digital Age. You will learn about how IT roles are changing, what organizations are looking for, and what you can do now to be ready.

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.

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