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

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.

Knowledge Management examines how we acquire, organize, manage, share, and utilize knowledge and information. The Internet gives us an overwhelming amount of information on a daily basis — and the volume of information available is growing rapidly! One of the biggest challenges for individuals and organizations involved in project management is to make the best use of this knowledge and information so they can operate more efficiently, improve decision making, and sustain a competitive advantage.

Some of you might just be starting out as a database administrator and need to know what a basic Transact-SQL query is for Microsoft SQL Server 2012, others might already be creating database objects. Either way, we put together a list of a few terms regarding Microsoft SQL Server that any database administrator should know.

There exists a need to properly read, deploy, and examine the results of Group Policy. By its architecture, Group Policy Deployment to the Clients or Servers can be erratic and latent, or even non-existent throughout your Enterprise Organization, frustrating Administrators who are rolling out the Group Policy to Client or Server computers. To help mitigate this behavior, I compiled these insights into a two part series from real-world examples, experiences, and fixes that have worked for me. I know that these Tips and Tricks will work for you, too.

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.

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:

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.

Organizations of all sizes have identified the benefits of cloud-based computing, whether it’s implementing a private or hybrid cloud on their own or accessing a public cloud through a service provider. Virtualization, a key component for building secure cloud environments, offers many advantages, including higher machine efficiency due to increased utilization, energy savings, and the flexibility to build or destroy virtual machines (VMs) on demand to meet changing organizational needs. Choosing open source virtualization over proprietary alternatives can significantly increase savings. However, an open source Linux Kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) offers several benefits to organizations beyond just cost savings. These benefits include security, reliability, availability, performance, and scalability. In this white paper, we’ll look at the relationship between open source virtualization and the cloud, and explore the security aspects of KVM hypervisor technology, especially in relation to how it leverages SELinux and related capabilities for secure public, private, and hybrid cloud performance.

Our mission statement for ITIL is to build better services to focus on the current goal for each ITIL task for the correct use of ITIL.