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This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the Microsoft Azure Developer Associate certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your certification exam.

This Certification Prep Guide provides an overview of the Microsoft Azure Administrator Associate certification and offers helpful tips that you can use when preparing for your certification exam.

CISSP is a widely desired indicator of knowledge, experience, and excellence on the resume of many IT professionals.

This certification prep guide provides an overview of the current Cisco Certified Network Professional-Security certification and offers helpful tips.

The CCNP Enterprise certification is the newest CCNP level certification. It replaces the CCNP Routing and Switching certification that has had multiple iterations throughout the years.

This certification prep guide provides an overview of the current Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) certification and offers helpful tips that students can use when preparing for the exam.

The Cisco Certified CyberOps Associate certification focuses on the cybersecurity branch of IT security

This paper is a high level, moderately technical understanding of Hyper-Converged Infrastructures. IT managers, data center architects, and administrators alike may find this information helpful in their pursuit to simplify the data center and improve application performance.

With VMware's recent release of the Horizon Suite (specifically View 6), VMware has taken the performance and usability features and put them all under the Blast moniker. This category of features is grouped from a marketing perspective but will retain their technical terms in the documentation, similar to how the term vSphere encompasses both ESXi and vCenter. Learn about the various features of the components that comprise the Blast family, including a brief discussion of what they are, improvements in version 6, and any notes or requirements for implementation.

Discover why healthcare organizations must take an immediate active role in securing their data. It is much more costly, monetarily as well as with regard to reputation, for an organization to react to a breach rather than plan for it.

Creativity is the “due diligence” of effective problem analysis. It is through creativity that the best possible solution for a problem is discovered. Without creativity, decisions are often one-dimensional, superficial, and near-sighted.

Cisco Unified Computing Solution (UCS) is a very popular and powerful solution. Cisco continues to provide updated UCS management options for the full range of data center installations.

This certification and exam guide discusses the various ITIL® certifications and what they might mean to you, your organization, and your career, as well as provide important test-taking tips for the ITIL certification exams. ITIL certifications help individuals validate their ability to demonstrate skills from a foundational to a mastery level of IT service management. ITIL certification can often be a key differentiator in the marketplace as well.

IBM Tivoli Endpoint Manager (ITEM) is a product designed to let enterprises automatically manage computers, allowing thousands of them to be managed by just a few support staff. With ITEM, tasks such as patch application, software distribution, and security policy enforcement can be performed on all of an organization's computers with minimal supervision.

PowerShell is the perfect tool for capturing the best practices that your IT staff already implements manually, and transforms that with scripting. It provides the ability to cross-reference information from a variety of different sources, and apply custom solutions that marshal your unique resources to solve the problems you face. The tool is easy to learn, included for free with all your Windows OSs, and provides enormously rich possibilities to grow skills over time.

5,700+ of your peers completed the survey. Gain access to Skillsoft’s IT Skills and Salary Report to see the results.

Securing corporate information can be a challenge, considering the numerous technologies and platforms that need to be protected. One technology that definitely helps achieve secure data is public key infrastructure (PKI), which enhances the security of data by using advanced access methods and making sure the authenticity of the data flow is preserved.

The OSI model is a conceptual tool used to discuss and describe network functions. The use of a standard reference model is essential to communicate ideas as well as create 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.

A local area network (LAN) provides a path of communication, allowing the delivery of packets of data, voice, or video originating from the sender (logical source address) to the receiver (logical destination address). Ethernet is the most common LAN used. As you start to learn about networking, remember that communication and the movement of large numbers, whether it is people, cars, mail, or network traffic, have a commonality. Everything you know and use in your daily life can be compared to the way traffic moves.

Discover how Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) will revolutionize IT and change the way you think about network connectivity and perhaps even application development. This white paper is written for networking professionals but it may offer valuable insight for those in cross-functional roles such as DevOps, server virtualization, and data center management.

Unless you know the meanings of the five symbols regularly used in PowerShell, they can obscure the purpose and actions of a PowerShell script. There will always be new cmdlets to decipher. Each new operating system release and application version will include new and useful cmdlets along with new parameters for existing cmdlets. You can't memorize them all, but with the basic knowledge of these particular symbols, you should be well equipped to follow the logic of many scripts.

Mobile payment systems have solid promise to become the dominant means of financial transactions, but there are some hurdles to overcome. Apple Pay might be the dominant force today, but Google Wallet and others are not far behind. The year 2014 was when digital and mobile payment systems became known to a wide range of the general population, while only techno-enthusiasts were aware of the options in the four to five years prior. Thus, mobile payment systems are not new, but customers and merchants are quickly adopting them now that they have become popular. It still remains your responsibility to thoroughly research any mobile payment option before implementing it. It is your money and you have the burden of ensuring that it has the best protection possible.

These five "secrets" to virtualizing desktops will greatly increase the chance of a successfully VDI implementation. It is very important to plan for this; to balance the hardware environment to handle not just average but peak load; to properly size storage, not just for capacity, but for performance as well; to minimize the number of base images so that the costs of maintaining each can also be minimized; and to accept and embrace the fact that people will connect with a wide variety of devices, and to create a plan to accommodate as many of these devices as is feasible at the lowest cost.

Here are some secrets, tips, and tricks for virtualizing your datacenter. We want to introduce some best practices for virtualization, while not being too biased towards one virtualization vendor or another. We'll use some common examples of products and tools that work with VMware's vSphere and Microsoft's Hyper-V, but with an eye toward virtualization in general, and not the specifics of any of the capable platforms that could be used). We will assume, however, that bare metal hypervisors, in other words virtualization platforms where the hyper visor is the OS, will be used as opposed to running a hypervisor on top of an existing general-purpose operating system (which is great in a lab, but terrible for data center projects).

Virtual storage area network (VSAN) and VMware View can offer cost savings and performance benefits compared to traditional SAN implementations for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). If you are starting a new desktop virtualization project, it would be wise for you to take the time to explore your options and compare VSAN to other options.

Discover the ways in which VMware's new vSphere 6.0 is more powerful, more manageable, more secure, and more flexible than any previous release of vSphere.

Advancing your knowledge of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud can be life-changing.

By using and implementing a many-to-many relationship in a cube, existing tables with user account information can be used directly to secure cube contents, rather than converting to role based security in the cube. You can also secure your analysis services more easily and access sensitive information contained within it.

This white paper addresses four different components of the Tivoli monitoring infrastructure for creating a high availability environment while providing redundancy and failover capacity. Although the principles are the same for each of these systems, the methods for adhering to these principles are different for each of them.

A Dynamic Multipoint Virtual Private Network (DMVPN) can be used with other networks like Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS), but streaming multicast is accomplished quite well using "Default" and "Data" Multicast Distribution Trees (MDTs) with MPLS.

Building upon the IT best practices of Lean, Agile Scrum and IT Service Management, DevOps adds that “missing” layer to tie together the service lifecycle workflow across Development and Operations, while leveraging the latest in automation technology. Demand for skilled, open-minded, and collaborative professionals with DevOps knowledge is rapidly increasing. Are you ready for change?    

In numerous Cisco classes, students learn about IPv4 and IPv6 address subnetting, complex subnetting, variable length subnet masking (VLSM), summarization, prefix routing, and address aggregation. These are valuable skills. In order to apply these skills efficiently, a network designer should possess one additional skill. Planning the IP address space for a Class A or B IPv4 address is necessary to apply the complex skills listed above properly. Complex subnetting, VLSM, and IP address summarization can be implemented simply and efficiently with proper planning.

IBM WebSphere Business Modeler (WBM) can be used in conjunction with an adoption of ITIL best practices. It is a full-featured process modeling and simulation tool that fits well with other IBM products that are used to define various service management processes and activities. In this white paper learn more about how WBM provides both the ability to visually define process activities and the ability to define detailed information about processes, including inputs, outputs, cost, revenue, roles and resources.

Experts agree that as long as there is data, there will be people trying to steal it. For every defense mechanism put in place, there is someone who will find a way to get around it. Constant vigilance, education of the workforce, and management support are all necessary to implement effective security policies. While a well-trained IT staff is key to protecting data, all employees must understand the importance of protecting company assets, including data.

This cybersecurity white paper explores the origins and motivations of cyberwarfare, and provides actions you can take in response.

Discover the ways in which cybercrime occurs in three realms: individual, business, and governmental. Learn what you can do to protect yourself and your organization.

In the spring of 2013, Cisco announced major updates to their Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) curricula, including a new version of the CCNA Routing and Switching exam (200-120 CCNA). This paper provides a review of the CCNA Routing and Switching exam's critical concepts, as an aid to students preparing to pass the latest version of the CCNA Routing and Switching exam.

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).

Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) can become a fairly complex environment and deployment, as it involves multiple components that all need to work together smoothly. Understanding the theory of how it all works will help in building a solid foundation for this complex technology in your organization. Although there is always something new to learn in PKI, this white paper gives you a great overview of the core configuration of your Microsoft CAs.

If you have been working with vSphere 5.1 or 5.5 lately, you have undoubtedly noticed that the latest features such as XvMotion and vSphere Replication are only available on the Web Client. This cheat sheet for the new Web Client includes instructions for configuring VMs, networking, storage, resource settings, cluster settings, permissions, and many other settings.