Resource Library

With Microsoft SQL Server 2016, you can distribute your data to the cloud using the Stretch Database feature to improve local access while allowing cloud access to large amounts of historical data. You can also provide transparent end-to-end security using Always Encrypted technology and track changes automatically through temporal data. Download this white paper to learn why these features and more make SQL Server 2016 Microsoft's most important release to date.

The cloud revolution is truly a revolution - the way we work, learn and even play is very different now than it was just 10 or 15 years and will probably be a lot more different in 10 or 15 years. With this in mind, let's look at 10 ways the cloud will (and to a large degree already has) changed the world.

The four-part Cloud TechTalks series shares practical insights and best practices for using the cloud. With exponential growth and unparalleled demand, there are few areas with greater opportunity than storage in the cloud. Join us for this complimentary, hour-long webinar to hear Susan Schreitmueller, IBM distinguished engineer and senior cloud advisor, share IBM's cloud storage solutions. Along with exploring trends and directions around IBM's roadmap for storage in the cloud, Schreitmueller will review Cloud Managed Services and SoftLayer options, as well as software-defined storage and IBM's suite of products.

Despite advances in security, hackers continue to break through network defenses. In this hour-long webinar, network security specialist Catherine Paquet will examine the favorite methods and targets of hackers and will introduce you to the different categories of security technologies. In this foundational presentation, you will learn about the benefits of security solutions such as firewalls, VPNs, IPS, identity services and BYOD.

Change is the order of the day, and if anything, the pace of business and technology change is accelerating. The business and customers are looking to IT service providers to be more responsive, delivering more frequent service changes with higher quality-resulting in services that deliver more value to the business. In order to continue to be relevant and of high value, ITIL must continue to benefit from other complementary best-practices for IT. DevOps, an approach that encourages improved communication, collaboration, and teamwork across development and operations, can have a positive influence in improving ITIL processes across the service life-cycle.

Use cases are an effective and widely used technique for eliciting software requirements. In this hour-long webinar, software development and process improvement expert Karl E. Wiegers will introduce you to a practical and straightforward use cases approach to requirements elicitation. You will learn how to focus on the goals that users have with a system, rather than emphasize system functionality.

Cloud computing is a big force in IT today, and it isn't going away. In fact, cloud adoption is going up geometrically, both for end users (think apps on your phone or tablet) as well as for organizations of all sizes. In fact, many smaller organizations may not have any on-premises infrastructure at all, other than networking infrastructure to get connected to the cloud. With this transformation in IT, it behooves all of us in the industry to understand it and adapt or risk being out of a job, like punch card operators.

PowerVC is a cloud tool based on OpenStack technology used to manage your virtualized environment running on your Power System. It automates rapid provisioning/deprovisioning and provides simple ongoing management of LPARs on Power Systems. Join us for this free, interactive webinar to hear senior power cloud consultants Vess Natchev and Kyle Wurgler from IBM System Lab Services.

Microsoft Office 365 has a vast array of features to explore. A rich administration interface, streamlined security, and versatile migration options make this one of the most interesting products when it comes to an SaaS public cloud solution.

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 this paper, we explore the basic usage of PowerShell in the pursuit of automating the management of Hyper-V deployments. This paper is targeted to IT professionals who have been "GUI-bound" to their management interfaces and have been working with or are embarking on the journey of Hyper-V administration. We'll explore the usage of Hyper-V specific cmdlets with the intent of ultimately being able to include multiple cmdlets in a "script" to allow for pushing one button and accomplishing the combined actions of many multiple mouse clicks in the GUI. No more repetitive tasks!

Switches play a vital role in moving data from one device to another. Specifically, switches greatly improve network performance, compared to hubs, by providing dedicated bandwidth to each end device, supporting full-duplex connectivity, utilizing the MAC address table to make forwarding decisions, and utilizing ASICs and CAM tables to increase the rate at which frames can be processed.

Interested in SharePoint 2013 developer training?  Learn from SharePoint instructor Tracy Wallace, if you're ready and which SharePoint 2013 developer class you should take.

Nowadays, you can read weekly articles about security attacks and stolen data. Even leading companies and organizations are victims of cybercrime. Attacks can include breaches at three levels: the physical level, which includes social engineering, system and network and applications (e.g., web and mobile). In this complimentary webinar, you will discover the benefits of using automated solutions to detect application vulnerabilities, provide steps to remediate them and avoid costly compliance violation.

AWS is an incredibly rich ecosystem of services and tools, some of which have security aspects baked in (like S3 SSE), and others that provide overarching security capabilities (like IAM and VPC) that apply to many services. With regard to data storage, operating system, and applications, security functions largely the same in the cloud or on-premises software. Customers can and should continue to follow best practices that have served them well in their own data centers.

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.

This paper covers the configuration of IP Multicast with Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) including the basics of Multicast with the Group Encrypted Transport VPN (GETVPN).

The first big push toward implementation of IPv6 was mobile devices. Now, one of the driving forces is the Internet of Things. As the name implies, this means everything, including machine to machine communication (M2M).

Like it or not, Internet of Things (IoT) is upon us. There are a number of factors that will impact its adoption rate, and the inevitable privacy (or lack of) discussions will likely happen sooner than later. This is going to change the world as we know it, in many cases for the better. But we will need to keep an eye on the extent to which it invades our personal lives if it is going to be the positive force it has the potential to be.

Discover how the enhanced performance and reliability of Amazon Aurora will help AWS customers reduce performance bottlenecks in their applications. The relatively low cost of Aurora will tempt many customers to migrate workloads to this implementation of RDS.

Kirsten Lora, our senior product director, discusses how Global Knowledge's Business Transformation Services prepare your employees to support your organizational change.

Amazon Redshift opens up enterprise data warehouse (EDW) capabilities to even the smallest of businesses, yet its costs, security, and flexibility also make it appealing to the largest of enterprises. It allows companies to easily and conveniently scale their EDW needs both up and down, and as a managed service, it allows your team to offload all of the "undifferentiated heavy lifting" of building and maintaining an EDW. Its raw storage costs are about one-fifth to one-tenth of traditional in-house EDW, and AWS has taken great care to ensure its performance is still competitive with those in-house solutions. Before deciding to use Amazon Redshift, however, it's important to understand what it is and is not.

This white paper explores the native AWS storage solutions, enabling you to deliver applications in the cloud in the most efficient, cost-effective, and secure manner. In terms of storage, it's important to understand the characteristics of each AWS storage option so that you can implement one or more AWS storage services to meet your needs. Often, you'll find that utilizing multiple storage options together will give you the best outcomes.

The process of learning how to subnet IP addresses begins with understanding binary numbers and decimal conversions along with the basic structure of IPv4 addresses. This paper focuses on the mathematics of binary numbering and IP address structure.

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

Often, we don't have time to learn the reasons behind the standards we use. But learning what instigated a standard goes a long way toward not only understanding its importance, but also more easily and effectively applying it in your workplace. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor Keith Sorn will discuss common networking standards and explain how they were determined and why they are relevant. He will fill you in on things like why it's important to use proper color-coding standards when making cable and why the length limitations on wired cable are essential. He will also explain new standards, such as power over fiber.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) is gaining momentum along with Software-Defined Networking (SDN). This paper examines the history of NFV and explores the prospects for networking to gradually evolve from a hardware-centric approach to a software-driven model. It concludes with an examination of future market implications and how NFV can help organizations to achieve their goals.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) created a cloud definition that has been well-accepted across the IT industry. NIST was mandated to assist government agencies to adopt cloud computing for their IT operations. As part of their mandate, NIST created multiple working groups to define cloud computing, its architecture, and requirements. In this paper we explore the center core of NIST's cloud definition.

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.

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.

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.

Cloud computing enables development teams to get applications into production faster. IT Service Management (ITSM) leaders must adopt new strategies and change existing processes or risk becoming a barrier to success. Cloud computing requires DevOps-the blending of development and operations with the goal of accelerating time-to-market and reducing time-to-value. The good news is that ITIL® is uniquely positioned to accelerate DevOps, but it requires changes to existing ITSM processes.

After a review of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and its close cousin Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), this white paper addresses three main deployment scenarios: SDN without deploying cloud computing, cloud computing without deploying SDN, and deploying cloud computing in conjunction with SDN. We'll look at use cases, when the approach makes sense, and any applicable limitations.

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.

Amazon Web Services: An OverviewThere's a really good chance that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has more than a few products to help you work faster, smarter, and more cost effectively. After all, the depth and breadth of AWS is significant, comprising more than 30 services in dozens of data centers located in nine regions across the globe. They offer computing, storage, networking, deployment, management, and a host of supporting services, such as queues and email services. Getting a clear understanding of what AWS is and how it can help your business can be challenging. Never fear. In this hour-long webinar, Global Knowledge instructor and cloud and big data analyst Rich Morrow will help. He'll give an overview of AWS and its many benefits.

In this seminar, discover how OpenStack can simplify your cloud infrastructure management. Experts from Red Hat, the leading contributor to the OpenStack project, will fill you in on how organizations have solved problems and increased business value with open-source cloud technology. They will also give you a peek into the future of Red Hat OpenStack and reveal how Red Hat training and certification can ensure the success of your cloud deployment.

In this video, Practice Leader Craig Brown discusses the new Microsoft Cloud Computing platforms and how to keep your organization's data secure and functioning properly while operating either partially or entirely on the cloud.

AWS has introduced Auto Scaling so that you can take advantage of cloud computing without having to incur the costs of adding more personnel or building your own software. You can use Auto Scaling to scale for high availability, to meet increasing system demand, or to control costs by eliminating unneeded capacity. You can also use Auto Scaling to quickly deploy software for massive systems, using testable, scriptable processes to minimize risk and cost of deployment.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers increased agility, developer productivity, pay-as-you-go pricing and overall cost savings. But you might wonder where to start, what pitfalls exist and how can you avoid them? How can you best save time and money? Learn what you need to know and where to start before launching an AWS-hosted service.

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.