Realtime Nexus Digital Library

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Active Directory Security

Written by distinguished authors Derek Melber, Dave Kearns, and Beth Sharesh, The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Active Directory Security shows you how to apply Group Policies, create effective Group Policy design and implementation, overcome the lack of auditing functionality in Microsoft tools, create best practices for delegating control in Active Directory (AD), and implement best practices and AD solutions.

The Definitive Guide to Building a Windows Server 2008 Infrastructure

Windows Server 2008 is Microsoft's first new server operating system in five years. Some of its new features will change Windows administration as we know it. Others may see a lot of hype in the market, but aren't as compelling as they may seem. The Definitive Guide to Building Windows Server 2008 Infrastructure will assist you in learning the parts of Server 2008 that are important to building the best possible Windows backbone for your business. You'll learn about the features of Server 2008 that should be implemented as soon as possible. At the same time, you'll come away with an understanding of those where you might want to steer clear, or merely put on the back-burner for a little while.

Whether you are interested in Server Manager, Active Directory, Storage Management, Server Core, Group Policy, Terminal Services, Security, or High Availability and Clustering, The Definitive Guide to Building Windows Server 2008 Infrastructure is your resource for understanding the value of Server 2008 and getting it implemented into your infrastructure in the best way possible. This guide uses plain English and plenty of real-world examples to show you the steps necessary to get it up and running as well as the best ways to manage it over the long term.

The Definitive Guide to Business Service Management

The Definitive Guide to Business Service Management provides a deep and broad look at the challenges and solutions of properly monitoring the network, systems, applications, and user experience for a business. Linking the goals and requirements of the business with the metrics and data of IT, Business Service Management enables a real-time and historical heads-up glimpse into the specific metrics that show how IT operations drive dollars and cents for the business.

BSM looks at IT elements not as individual units, but as parts of a whole that provide value to the business and quality service to its customers. This process involves linking business-critical IT services to the health and performance of underlying infrastructure and application components.

This guide discusses the challenges of monitoring business systems from the perspective of its users and shows you how BSM software and methodology illuminates business-relevant solutions. Noted author, columnist, and speaker Greg Shields discusses the best ways to implement BSM as well as getting the best return out of it. This guide will enlighten the business leader as much as the network administrator in understanding the importance of BSM, as well as the issues involved with implementation.

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Blocking Spam with Sender Validation

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Blocking Spam with Sender Validation is a free eBook from Realtime Publishers that will put you on the road towards learning about this technology and how it can be used to secure businesses more effectively than ever before.

Written by notable computing expert Alan Sugano, this guide will familiarize you with Sender Validation and how it compares with other anti-spam solutions (blacklists, key word filters, Heuristics and Bayesian filtering, etcetera). Since there are many different Sender Validation solutions to choose from, Alan will also help you discover what to look when choosing the right system for your business.

The Essentials Series: Communications Enabled Business

Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) is an important new innovation in the automation of human communications within the context of business applications. CEBP is defined as tightly integrating communications technologies with business processes and applications to enable concurrent or consecutive communication among customers, suppliers and employees.

The Essentials Series: Communications Enabled Business illustrates the benefits of enabling business processes with communications capabilities (CEBP) as well as techniques, best practices, administration/management tools, third party utilities and example scenarios.

The Shortcut Guide to Extended Validation SSL Certificates

The Shortcut Guide to Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates examines security challenges to online business operations as well as responses to those concerns. This guide describes how technologies such as SSL have been used in the past to prevent fraud and ensure confidentiality and how new threats, such as phishing scams, are driving the need for the improved authentication and verification provided by extended validation SSL certificates. The Shortcut Guide to Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates also includes detailed descriptions of the EV SSL certification process as well as the user experience. The work concludes with a look at the future of extended validation technologies and services.

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to VB Scripting for Windows

Practically any Windows administration task can be automated. There are software developers that spend their careers creating tools to automate Windows administration. Even Microsoft provides Windows administration automation tools with command-line utilities such as Cacls.exe, which helps automate the process of changing NTFS file permissions. But as a Windows administrator, you probably think you don't have time to sit around programming your own automation tools. That's where you're wrong: VBScript offers a powerful, easy to understand scripting language that is practically tailor-made for Windows administration.

This guide will provide the basics of VBScript. Rather than attempt to show you every nook and cranny of VBScriptâ€”because you're probably more interested in just getting the job done, this guide will show you everything you need to know to get started with VBScript. In addition, there will be plenty of sample scripts to give you a little jump start.

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Configuration Management for the Windows Enterprise

What is configuration management? Why do you need it in your enterprise, and how is it accomplished? Although many administrators feel that they are familiar with the topic, most have truly only scratched the surface. The IT industry in general has come a long way with configuration management in just a few short years, and the term now encompasses much more than simply building client systems by using a standardized drive image.

In The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Configuration Management for the Windows Enterprise, industry expert Don Jones will help you understand what todayâ€™s enterprise can expect from configuration management, why configuration is such a critical business need, andâ€”most importantlyâ€”how you can add modern, enterprise-class configuration management to your network.

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Email Protection

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Email Protection will give you critical, need-to-know information to help you properly protect your corporate messaging system from a wide variety of external and internal security threats. Although the book focuses on Microsoft Exchange-based enterprises, the concepts, principles, and methodologies presented within are universally applicable to virtually all messaging platforms. The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Email Protection is authored by messaging industry and Exchange guru Paul Robichaux. Paul provides readers with real-world insights to help them architect secure messaging systems and deal practically with real-world security problems. From virus protection to malware protection, this eBook is a must read for anyone involved in securing Exchange and other messaging platforms.

The Shortcut Guide to IT Workload Automation and Job Scheduling

With the explosion of data systems in most enterprises, the need to integrate and share data across systems becomes vital. For most organizations, this means coordinating a delicate balance of processes that move data between systems. The task of orchestrating this movement, tracking and troubleshooting issues, and optimizing the use of shared enterprise resources is quite daunting. Add to that the changing face of service oriented architectures and the need to maintain green IT operations, and the prospect can become overwhelming.

The Shortcut Guide to IT Workload Automation and Job Scheduling provides CIOs, IT Managers, Enterprise Architects and IT Operations personnel with an incisive look into the issues surrounding the scheduling and automation of jobs in heterogeneous enterprise environments. It provides insights into the key obstacles to overcome and provides best practices to help design and maintain the operation of mission critical tasks throughout the organization.

The Shortcut Guide to Managing Certificate Lifecycles

Digital certificates are the central component in a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) used to protect personally identifiable information, prove that online merchants are authentic, and protect the integrity of online transactions. Yet, many people have never even heard of digital certificates. They are buried deep inside many applications and technologies in today’s Web-powered world, which most people take for granted.

If you have ever shopped for a certificate, you know that there is a wide selection of products and vendors from which to choose. Knowing what you need and, more importantly, why you need it, can be pretty confusing—even for a seasoned professional. This guide to managing the certificate lifecycle will cover a range of topics surrounding digital certificates, with an eye towards giving you the inside track when it comes to making decisions about PKI. This guide is for both those new to digital certificates and for technologists with extensive experience.

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Patch Management

There is a great need for effective security in the IT market. The result of exploited administrative, product, and physical vulnerabilities can result in a companyâ€™s significant loss of productivity as well as considerable monetary expense. The Administrator Shortcut Guide to Patch Management explores overall security as well as provides a detailed discussion of the critical security role of patch management.

The Shortcut Guide to Selecting the Right Virtualization Solution

With so many products on the market that advertise virtualization as a feature, it is important to demystify this term in order to determine which virtualization solutions are actually valuable in your environment in comparison with those that will only complicate your operations. The Shortcut Guide to Selecting the Right Virtualization Solution will help you understand the critical components associated with making the jump to virtualization.

By the end of this eBook, you will:

Recognize what systems work best in the virtualized environment
Know how best to manage that environment
Understand where you will (and where you wonâ€™t) get the best return on your virtualization investment.

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to User Management and Provisioning

The Administrator Shortcut Guide to User Management and Provisioning is authored by Dave Kearns, one of the industry's most respected experts. The book provides critical information and real-world examples to administrators, managers, directors, and CTOs at any stage in planning or deploying a user management and provisioning solution.

The Shortcut Guide to Automating Network Management and Compliance

Networks are growing fast, and companies are faced with increasing outside requirements for management—what we call compliance issues. In order to reduce overhead costs yet maintain flexibility, companies need to automate many network management, security, and compliance tasks. The Shortcut Guide to Automating Network Management and Compliance is a fast-paced, short guide that will give executive-level IT managers to network administrators the know-how to improve network operations, security and compliance. The book focuses on advanced tools and technologies to make auditing easier, to improve uptime, and more.

The Shortcut Guide to Exchange Server 2007 Storage Systems

The conventional way of planning for Exchange Server storage is to throw a lot of disk storage at the server and hope that is sufficient. Mail storage requirements continue to grow for even average users; these users place more and more capacity requirements not only on disk storage but also on disk I/O capacity. As current capacity requirements are exceeded, the storage system must provide scalability. The Shortcut Guide to Exchange Server 2007 Storage Systems, authored by Microsoft Exchange MVP Jim McBee, covers Exchange Server storage capacity requirement planning, the basics of using iSCSI SANs, and best practices for scalability and SAN operations.

The Shortcut Guide to Managing Disk Fragmentation

Storing data on a disk has become less expensive and more convenient in modern times. But with that increase in storage capacity and decrease in price comes a problem of management. There are many common misunderstandings leading to operational inefficiencies when it comes to the management of disk fragmentation and defragmentation.

The Shortcut Guide to Managing Disk Fragmentation will help IT professionals, analysts, and engineers to understand the benefit of a holistic disk defragmentation strategy across the enterprise. The new guide will examine how the pervasive problem of fragmentation affects a computer system and what approaches are effective in reducing these effects. Lastly, the guide will outline the mechanics of automatic defragmentation, and how to select and deploy an automatic defragmentation solution.

The Shortcut Guide to Network Management for the Mid-Market

Successfully managing a computer network means keeping straight dozens or hundreds of network devices. And, unfortunately, too many network administrators donâ€™t have the time or the experience to implement processes to monitor and automate network management. The Shortcut Guide to Network Management for the Mid-Market, specifically written for SMB and mid-market businesses, outlines real-world technologies, processes, and guiding steps necessary to transform your network operations from reactive to proactive.

Using the OSI FCAPS network model as a framework, this guide will lead the network engineer and the IT manager through the critical components of fault, performance, configuration and security management, and will provide a detailed discussion on network troubleshooting and diagnostics. The Shortcut Guide to Network Management for the Mid-Market discusses technologies to implement for centralized management and monitoring as well as proactive steps you can take in your network to plan and prepare for problems before they happen.

The Shortcut Guide to Optimized WAN Application Delivery

The Shortcut Guide to Optimized WAN Application Delivery offers insight into the whys and wherefores, as well as the nuts and bolts involved in optimizing WAN applications to improve the end user experience. Along the way, readers will learn about the features and shortcomings of TCP/IP that help to make WAN optimization necessary. By the time readers finish this eBook, they will be comfortable with the key issues involved in optimizing WAN applications, as well as the tools and techniques used to improve WAN application experience and enhance user perceptions.

"IT professionals seeking to understand how WAN optimization can help to improve application response time and performance will find The Shortcut Guide to Optimized WAN Application Delivery to be an invaluable resource," explains author Ed Tittel. "They will learn how WAN applications are optimized, what kinds of optimization tools and techniques deliver the best results, and how to use WAN optimization to improve the end user experience."

The Shortcut Guide to Protecting Business Internet Usage

The Internet is now woven into the fabric of business. Organizations that have that long practiced sound procedures for protecting the integrity of their operations and preserving appropriate working environments must now attend to threats from the Internets. Both Internet threats and the countermeasures deployed to stop them are growing in complexity. Readers of The Shortcut Guide to Protecting Business Internet Usage will find an explanation of the business drivers behind the need to protect information assets and comply with regulations, as well as technical details on protecting IT infrastructure and best practices for managing the lifecycle of Internet access protection systems.

The Shortcut Guide to PC Restoration and Disaster Recovery

While most organizations depend on information technology to make decisions, keep business moving forward and retain their operational edge, the most significant portion of the process is often neglected and unprotected. The Shortcut Guide to PC Restoration and Disaster Recovery addresses how to protect, upgrade and manage the personal computing environments, as well as its data and the keys to its productivity-enhancing configurations. Techniques for preserving key information and assuring that both applications and operating systems are safe and secure are discussed in detail. In addition, steps for moving desktops from one hardware platform to another as well as how to recover from unplanned disaster quickly and efficiently are outlined in the guide. Lastly, The Shortcut Guide to PC Restoration and Disaster Recovery provides critical analysis to help decisions-makers choose the people, policies and platforms to keep their people working!

The Shortcut Guide to Securing Automated File Transfers

The ability to securely transfer files to clients, business partners, and other corporate branches in your enterprise is an absolute necessity. The Shortcut Guide to Securing Automated File Transfers, authored by 24-year computing veteran Ed Tittel, offers a consolidated explanation of the techniques that you need to know when choosing a technology or application for secure file transfer. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), IP Security (IPSec), Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), tunneling, and Secure File Transfer Protocol are each examined to give you a better understanding of how you can better protect your enterprise against internal and external security threats. In addition, Tittel lays out the steps to planning for secure file transfer deployment.

The Shortcut Guide to Network Compliance and Security

One of the reasons that compliance management has become such a boom business for consultants is that companies know their existing techniques often arenâ€™t sufficient to meet compliance requirements. Worse, companies often arenâ€™t even sure how regulations such as HIPAA, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, 21 CFR, and more even apply to their technological assets. Too often, regulation requirements are dumped onto technical professionals for implementation, leaving those professionals confused and frustrated about what they are supposed to do. It doesnâ€™t have to be this way. The Shortcut Guide to Network Compliance and Security offers a few useful tools to make compliance easy and straightforward. This guide will enable your organization to focus on business instead of these mandatory rules.

The Definitive Guide to Controlling Malware, Spyware, Phishing, and Spam

The Internet is home to malicious programs that can steal, destroy, and make data inaccessible; spyware that ignores social conventions of privacy to track Internet users' activities online; phishing scams that bring the art of the con artist to new threatening levels; and spam, the inevitable electronic counterpart to direct mail that requires so little investment even miniscule response rates justify its use. This guide explores some of the most pressing threats to businesses and organizations from the Internet along with best practices for addressing them.

The Definitive Guide to Converged Network Management

The convergence of voice and data networks has been evolving and gaining momentum for several years. Organizations are implementing VoIP in an effort to cut communications costs or leverage the competitive advantage of integrated services. VoIP implementers focus on issues of voice quality, and interoperability â€“ important factors in the delivery of Quality of Service (QoS). In the integrated services environment, voice security needs to be treated as data security. And data security needs to be treated as voice security.

The Definitive Guide to Converged Network Management highlights the overall service management challenges facing enterprise and identify common industry best practices for effectively managing an integrated, unified communications environment using VoIP. It offers a series of systematic and holistic techniques for managing the total integrated network to ensure a consistent service delivery and support for ongoing business operations.

The Definitive Guide to Enterprise Change Management

In The Definitive Guide to Enterprise Change Management, an expert guides you through enterprise change management and enables you to explore the ever-growing demand in organizations for a comprehensive enterprise change management solution. This eBook provides strategies for systems administrators to manage change in the software development life cycle, system configurations, and enterprise content.

The Definitive Guide to Exchange Disaster Recovery and Availability

Understanding Exchange disaster recovery can take a while. The first step, naturally enough, is to gain an understanding of the fundamentals of Exchange protection. Later chapters of this guide will describe the specific technologies you can use to improve the availability and recoverability of your messaging system and its related business services; first, though, we have to start with an explanation of the causes of downtime, the general classes of availability and protection technology, and ways to assess your Exchange environment to determine the most effective methods for you to better protect your Exchange infrastructure.

The Definitive Guide to Email Management and Security

Learn the key steps for dealing with email threats and vulnerabilities! This eBook will provide a practical guide to increasing email security as well as give tips on how to deal with the growing dependence on corporate email. Kevin Beaver, information security expert, takes a close look at email security issues. From employee monitoring to dealing with spam, email security is a growing business concern and this eBook will give you the tools needed to effectively manage email and increase corporate security.

The Definitive Guide to Enterprise Network Configuration and Change Management

A revealing look at the importance of network configuration and change management, The Definitive Guide to Enterprise Network Configuration and Change Management appeals to IT professionals and company executives who need to keep data secure and networks available. It is a comprehensive look at how to formulate and implement change management best practices and processes as well as which tools are available to help.

The Definitive Guide to Identity Management

The Definitive Guide to Identity Management is the most concise and practical guide available to explain the concept of Identity Management. This eBook, written by noted author and speaker Archie Reed, looks at specific implementations and solutions to enable the practical implementation of Identity Management solutions, including the relationships between identity and single sign-on, Web-based single sign-on, PKI, USB smart tokens, keys, smart cards, biometrics, Internet and intranet security, and VPNs and gateways.

The Definitive Guide to Information Theft Prevention

Information theft is a growing threat to individuals and organizations. The Definitive Guide to Information Theft Prevention describes the evolving threat of information theft and its financial, legal, and brand impact on organizations. The book addresses information protection and privacy regulations, the increasing threats from unmanaged devices as well as challenges to securing managed devices, and the role of on-demand security in minimizing these threats. This guide also includes extensive discussions on risk management, incident responses and emerging best practices for leveraging on-demand security.

The Definitive Guide to Successful Deployment of VoIP and IP Telephony

The Definitive Guide to Successful Deployment of VoIP and IP Telephony, by IP Telephony expert Jim Cavanagh, provides practical insights into the specific steps organizations need to take to be successful with the implementation of VoIP and Internet Protocol Telephony. This book goes beyond the theoretical and provides insights and guidance gleaned from work with some of the largest enterprises, institutions, and agencies around the world. It puts that knowledge into a form that can be put right to work. Written in a clear, concise format for both technical and non-technical professionals alike, this book provides checklists and electronic "Report Cards" that implementers can use to select and deploy the right telephony solutions, applications, services, and testing and monitoring tools for their own specific situations.

The Definitive Guide to Quality Application Delivery

The Definitive Guide to Quality Application Delivery focuses on the whole picture of improving quality in your applications, starting from the requirements and design phase and continuing through development and testing. Common myths are examined and dispelled, including the myth that simply purchasing software testing tools will instantly make quality better for everyone. Quality, you'll learn, is about far more than bugs. The perception of quality starts with an application's ability to efficiently solve business needs, and this book constructs a whole new approach to quality that focuses on the alignment of software with the business as a primary quality indicator. Putting the business in the "driver's seat," ending the vicious cycle of software disappointment, and sticking to a truly business-focused approach to design, development, and testing - these are the keys to quality application delivery.

The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter

Securing information is at the forefront of many executives' minds, and for good reason. Every day news reports document information security incidents that cost corporations significant time and money to resolve, often at the expense of their brands and reputations. Public attention has generally focused on preventing harm to networks by creating an impenetrable perimeter to keep the bad outsiders at bay. Reality demonstrates, however, that the network is highly susceptible to threats that originate within the perimeter, as well as threats that make it through a perimeter that is, in today's environment, highly vulnerable and porous and cannot feasibly be made impenetrable. The Definitive Guide to Security Inside the Perimeter describes many of these insider threats, as well as best practices for guarding against them.

The Definitive Guide to Service-Oriented Systems Management

The information technology in an organization is a dynamic resource that is constantly adapted to meet changing needs. The rational practice of controlling that change is known as systems management. As with many other organizational practices, systems management has evolved from informal, ad hoc responses to immediate needs to a well understood, formalized practice. This book, The Definitive Guide to Service-Oriented Systems Management, examines best practices for systems management with an emphasis on a modularized approach known as services oriented management (SOM).

"Systems management responsibilities continue to grow in complexity - business alignment and compliance are now demanded as much as technical integrity and systems availability. The service oriented management (SOM) model has emerged as a method for managing that complexity," explains author Dan Sullivan. "The Definitive Guide to Service-Oriented Systems Management describes the key elements of SOM, including service delivery, service support, application and asset management, as well as governance and security management."

The Definitive Guide to Scaling Out SQL Server 2005

Enterprise applications have become more complex and have taken on a greater burden for managing a companyâ€™s critical data. At the same time, the amount of data managed by those applications has swelled exponentially as companies begin to track an increasingly greater amount of informationâ€”data about customers, vendors, sales, and more.

In The Definitive Guide to Scaling Out SQL Server 2005, industry expert Don Jones offers strategies for expanding a SQL Server 2005 database so that it can grow to meet the mounting and constantly changing requirements that are put upon it.

The Definitive Guide to Securing Windows in the Enterprise

You can spend a lifetime attempting to master Windows security and spend much of your free time discussing and debating the topic with other IT professionals. However, this guide will concentrate on security as more than just philosophy and policiesâ€”security is a practical topic with real-world impact, which is the focus of this guide.

Get the latest information on securing clients, file servers, servers and services, and active directory in The Definitive Guide to Securing Windows in the Enterprise. Additionally, learn about reducing your attack surface as well as security through maintenance and filtering with this essential Windows security guide.

The Definitive Guide to Vista Migration

Microsoft has been working for several years on the next-generation of Windows, and this effort is now to coming to fruition. Will Vista warrant yet another massive Windows desktop migration? The answer is yes -- Vista heralds a completely new era in secure Windows computing, complete with support for the very latest in service-oriented architectures and the provision of a host of services that can traverse the firewall over the most common HTTP and HTTPS ports. The Definitive Guide to Vista Migration provides a detailed roadmap to Vista migrations in order to take full advantage of the new enterprise-ready Vista feature set. This guide outlines best practices for migration planning and execution as well as piloting a migration for enterprises of all sizes. This book will help all levels of IT professional, from systems administrators to IT directors, who are considering Vista migration and want to see it done right.

The Definitive Guide to Virtual Platform Management

The Definitive Guide to Virtual Platform Management is designed to help IT staff better manage the complexity of virtualization. This guide begins with a discussion of the business value of virtualization and how organizations can benefit from this technology. Next, details related to virtualization approaches and challenges related to managing heterogeneous environments will be discussed. Based on these issues, the focus will turn to ways in which IT organizations can address all of these issues. Details include monitoring and optimizing virtualization performance, developing policies and processes, and automating data center operations. Finally, a list of important features is developed that IT organizations should look for in a virtualization management solution.

The Essentials Series: Eliminating Administrator Rights

Too often in todayâ€™s IT environments the solution for difficult applications or difficult users is to simply grant them administrator rights and move along. Yet that accumulated distribution of admin rights, and the inappropriate actions and potential for problems that goes with it, eventually takes away ITâ€™s ability to control the environment. The problem with the Windows OS is that sometimes the only way to accomplish a needed task is with Administrator rights. With the right tools and techniques, no more. In The Essentials Series: Eliminating Administrator Rights, weâ€™ll talk about the issues with granting privileges and the ways to take them back. Youâ€™ll understand the concept of Least Privilege, the business benefits of eliminating excessive privileges, and the limitations youâ€™ve probably already experienced in todayâ€™s native solutions for privilege management.

The Essentials Series: Active Directory 2008 Operations

In The Essentials Series: Active Directory 2008 Operations, Windows administration guru Greg Shields provides step-by-step guidance to assist the Windows administrator with understanding the implications to security, recovery, and auditing upon the upgrade to Active Directory in Windows Server 2008. Greg provides useful advice and detailed instructions on implementing auditing and recovering objects for Active Directory in Windows Server 2008, as well as best practices for designing and implementing Read-Only Domain Controllers

The Essentials Series: Email-Centric Data Loss Prevention

Data loss prevention (DLP) is becoming a more common business practice as the demands for compliance increase and as awareness of how the lack of DLP strategies inhibits business operations. The Essential Series: Email-Centric Data Loss Prevention provides an overview of key aspects of DLP, including: the varied executive management responsibilities, the role of employees in data loss prevention, and best practices for automating DLP controls. Together, the three articles in this series describe the major fundamental issues in email centric data loss prevention and offer best practices for effective and efficient DLP management.

The Essentials Series: The Business Imperatives of Compliance in the UK

The Essentials Series: Business Imperatives of Compliance in the UK examines the compliance requirements that affect practically every type of business in the UK and have changed the way organizations manage information risks. This new series, intended for information security and compliance managers, explores the underlying premise of regulatory compliance and how it can be managed through the effective use of policies and procedures in day-to-day business. Anyone playing a part in compliance in UK-based organizations will benefit from the practical solutions and suggestions outlined in the material.

The Essentials Series: The Business Value of SIP VoIP and Trunking

Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has taken root as the unifying protocol on which all vital communications services now rely. SIP is more than just another standards-based protocol. Today it's the de facto standard for unified communications, enabling trunking, peering and voice/data/video integration.

The Essentials Series: The Business Value of SIP VoIP and Trunking explores advances in VoIP technologies with VoIP as a critical foundation element for unified communications. The series closes with a review of the convergence of telecommunications trunking with the unified communications premise that voice is the platform.

The Definitive Guide to Windows 2003 Storage Resource Management

Arguably, storage is the most important area of Information Technology (IT). Certainly network infrastructure is required to provide access, and server operations are necessary to process and share information, but storage is the heart and soul of an organizationâ€™s information system. When storage is endangered or stored information is lost, the other pieces of the system become irrelevantâ€”the system becomes technology without the information. Through this guide, youâ€™re embarking on a hopefully enjoyable journey through which you will learn valuable information about the Windows approach to storage and how to best make use of it.

The Definitive Guide to Windows Software Deployment

In this guide, The Definitive Guide to Windows Software Deployment, industry expert Chris Long discusses essential concepts of Windows software deployment, including deployment methodology, network infrastructure considerations, and best-of-breed installation tools.

The Definitive Guide to Windows Desktop Administration

Get the latest information about desktop administration and learn to lower TCO with this in-depth look at how to manage the Windows desktop. The Definitive Guide to Windows Desktop Administration will provide valuable guidance and real-world examples for creating an efficient desktop administration plan. Bob Kelly, one of the industry’s top Windows management experts, looks at Windows desktop administration from OS deployment to scripting custom solutions.

The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer Technology

You hear a lot about Windows Installer (.MSI) technology, but what does it really mean for you and your organization? What is â€œunder the hoodâ€ of a Windows Installer installation? What do you need to know to effectively migrate to the .MSI standard? The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer Technology for System Administrators explores answers to these questions and more.

The Definitive Guide to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services

The Definitive Guide to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services not only introduces you to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services but also walks you through and touches upon installation and configuration issues, load balancing and session directories, administration of Terminal Services, and much more.

The Definitive Guide to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services Updated Edition

With the launch of Windows Server 2003 (WS2K3), Microsoft has continued to improve upon Terminal Services. At the launch event, Microsoft focused on the fact that this version of Windows is the most customer driven to date. Terminal Servicesâ€™ new features clearly demonstrate this focus, and Microsoft has continued this focus on customer-driven enhancements with the recent release of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1.

This book will cover the new features and enhancements in WS2K3 Terminal Services and the new features included in Service Pack 1. It will also include best practices for configuring and managing Terminal Services with an eye to the new techniques available to systems administrators in WS2K3. Because of Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 5.2, Active Directory Service Interfaces (ADSI) access to Terminal Services attributes of user objects, new Group Policy Object (GPO) controls, and Session Directory, there exists the ability to use native Terminal Services as an enterprise-class solution for providing users with Terminal Servicesâ€“based desktops.

The Developer Shortcut Guide to SUSE Linux

Written for experienced developers who are looking to get a quick start on writing open sourceâ€“based enterprise applications, The Developer Shortcut Guide to SUSE Linux, authored by John Featherly, offers the most up-to-date information on the capabilities of SUSE LINUX as a development environment for enterprise .NET and Java applications.

The Essentials Series: Managing Access to Privileged Accounts

Managing access to privileged accounts is a hot button issue for all organizations, especially those subject to compliance or due diligence information security requirements. Learning how to properly manage privileged access to corporate resources mitigates a major source of potential risk and exposure. In The Essentials Series: Managing Access to Privileged Accounts, author and industry veteran Ed Tittel discusses the basic vocabulary and issues involved in managing privileged access to corporate networks and information systems. He reveals the key elements required for regulatory compliance for several industries including finance, health services, government, and more, as well as a set of best practices for bringing privileged account and session usage to heel.

The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL

The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL, authored by IT compliance and regulations expert Rebecca Herold, describes the techniques, best practices, administration/management tools and example scenarios for successful implementation of IT service support using ITIL. This new guide offers helpful examples of problems faced by IT departments today, the benefits provided by ITIL, and the business value of ITIL. The Shortcut Guide to Improving IT Service Support through ITIL goes on to describe in more detail how to make change management, incident management and problem management more effective through ITIL, along with outlining how ITIL helps support compliance. The last chapter provides a roadmap for successful ITIL implementation.

The Essentials Series: Mid-Market Storage Management and Virtualization

The Essentials Series: Mid-Market Storage Management and Virtualization examines the business value of data as well as strategies for optimizing its storage and management. Topics range from the cost of losing business data and the advantages of various backup models to improving storage management operations and optimizing performance with storage virtualization. This Essential Series spans both the technical and business issues of storage management to give the reader a full perspective of the challenges and benefits of effective storage management.

The Shortcut Guide to IT Service Management and Automation

The Shortcut Guide to IT Service Management and Automation provides an insightful overview of IT service management and the service management life cycle. Author and compliance expert Rebecca Herold demonstrates how technology acts as a strategic differentiator by enabling business growth, driving operational efficiencies to lower maintenance costs, optimizing outcomes, and reducing IT risks. This excellent new guide discusses how the ITIL v3 framework can facilitate the delivery of high-quality IT services across the complete service management life cycle. In addition, the framework can help to align IT operations, applications, and strategies to achieve better governance, compliance, and efficiency across the IT environment, ultimately demonstrating the true value of IT to business units.

Herold also addresses emerging challenges such as how to quickly correlate events across numerous diverse systems, and coordinate rollouts of virtualization and unified management of new applications. Many of these processes are now outsourced, so The Shortcut Guide to IT Service Management and Automation includes a discussion of the considerations for choosing a service management process vendor. Throughout this eBook, the important topics related to automation to support these processes are highlighted.

The Shortcut Guide to Run Book Automation

Todayâ€™s IT professional is charged with a multitude of wide-ranging responsibilities, including system administration, updates, user account management, compliance checks, and many more tasks involved in keeping systems sound, secure, and up-to-date. Run Book Automation (RBA) offers tools and techniques to address all of these duties, and helps to bring multiple systems and solutions together within a single, consistent, and coherent set of activities that can be automated, scheduled, tracked, and handled with much less muss and fuss.

In The Shortcut Guide to Run Book Automation, author Ed Tittel shows you how to use RBA to automate repetitive or regular tasks by creating basic task building blocks, dragging and dropping icons into a workflow, and supplying direction as needed. By offering a set of common use cases as well as a list of best practices for implementing RBA, Tittel gives you the practical know-how to define, create, orchestrate, and manage workflows that support many of your organizationâ€™s operational processes.

The Essentials Series: PCI Compliance

In The Essentials Series: PCI Compliance, compliance expert Rebecca Herold discusses and demonstrates how meeting the PCI DSS requirements for logging also benefits businesses by putting into place log management practices that:

Help to identify when authorized users may be doing things they should not be doing.
Help to reveal when unauthorized users from outside the network perimeter have breached the network.
Reveal vulnerabilities within applications that could have led to information security incidents and privacy breaches if they were not discovered.

Within these papers, Rebecca includes real life examples, along with insights from QSA auditors and log management experts.

The Reference Guide to Data Center Automation

It’s no secret that IT departments are faced with pressure to increase service levels while decreasing operational costs. Data center automation provides a perfect solution for achieving such levels of operational efficiency. Co-authored by network management and IT automation experts Don Jones and Anil Desai, The Reference Guide to Data Center Automation provides a comprehensive, in-depth resource to help IT professionals understand both the value that IT automation brings to network management, as well as the individual components of a well managed IT organization.

The Reference Guide to Data Center Automation is offered in eight volumes. Each volume contains articles describing key concepts, terms, and topics related to data center automation.

The Essentials Series: Messaging and Web Security

The Essentials Series: Messaging and Web Security, now available as a single PDF download, is an excellent article series focused on helping security professionals address the ongoing task of keeping an organization secure from the multitude of online and messaging threats. Authored by security expert Dan Sullivan and published online at The Realtime Messaging and Web Security Community, the articles in this exclusive series cover critical topics such as: Defense in Depth, Email Compliance and Regulations, Combating Spam, and Anti-Phishing Best Practices.

The Essentials Series: SOA and Mainframe Applications

Service oriented architectures (SOA) offer a flexible framework for building business applications; mainframes have long been the center of transaction processing and are essential to fully functional SOA services. Bringing mainframe applications and data to SOA environments is challenging for both developers and managers. The Essentials Series: SOA and Mainframe Applications examines key aspects of SOA/mainframe integration projects and provides best practices for addressing common challenges facing application designers, developers, and project managers.

The Executive Guide to IT Process Automation

The Executive Guide to IT Process Automation establishes the groundwork for orchestrating IT processes with a focus on business needs. Expert author Chad Marshall provides in-depth commentary that leverages industry best practices to demonstrate how an organization can increase the effectiveness of their IT systems, decrease their reaction times to new business initiatives, and enable the delivery of standards and compliance across the enterprise.

In addition, The Executive Guide to IT Process Automation delivers a road map for the automation journey that evaluates process maturity and provides insightfully crafted IT process definitions to enable ITIL and ITSM. The guide goes on to demonstrate how executives can identify their highest impact areas for automation, such as virtualization, consolidation, security, provisioning processes and disaster recovery and concludes with a best practice guide on how to select the vendors best capable of automating IT processes.

The Essentials Series: Messaging and Web Security - Volume 2

Volume Two of The Essentials Series: Messaging and Web Security examines new challenges to combating the growing proliferation of online threats that includes spam, phishing, malware and spyware. This expert series includes twenty-seven articles in total, each authored by security veteran Dan Sullivan. The Essentials Series: Messaging and Web Security - Volume II will be especially useful to small and mid-sized organizations that face the same challenges as larger enterprises, but are limited by their level of resources.

The Tips and Tricks Guide to Active Directory Troubleshooting

The Tips and Tricks Guide to Active Directory Troubleshooting will save you time and help you maximize the performance of your enterprise network. Written in an easy to read Q & A format, this book shows you the strategies, technologies, and processes utilized by the experts to help you simplify and enhance the effectiveness of your network configuration management. From troubleshooting to security and change management, this book provides step-by-step instructions on how to ensure optimal performance for your enterprise networks. You will turn to this guide again and again as you face both strategic and day-to-day network administration challenges.

The Tips and Tricks Guide to Creating Business Continuity through Enterprise Storage Solutions

Years of market competition and decreasing storage costs have resulted in many disparate and difficult to manage storage environments. Add to these environments the demands of international regulatory compliance, the business need for information management and the ever-present security concerns of maintaining a production storage environment and management can become quickly overwhelmed. Itâ€™s at this point that disaster most often strikes.

Written in an easy to understand Q & A format, The Tips and Tricks Guide to Creating Business Continuity through Enterprise Storage Solutions leverages years of industry storage experience and IT service delivery management to deliver a consolidated guide focused on maintaining the security, availability, cost and information management of complex enterprise storage environments. Whether you're a storage practitioner looking to broaden an understanding of business continuity, security and compliance best practices, or a seasoned CIO examining ways to consolidate an ever increasing storage infrastructure, this guide has the answers youâ€™ve been looking for.

The Essentials Series: Messaging and Web Security - Volume 3

The Essentials Series: Messaging and Web Security - Volume III continues the series' focus on managing IT infrastructure and applications in an increasingly complex security environment. The articles are especially geared towards application developers, database administrators, Web architects, andsystems managers, and focus on emerging threats to enterprise as well as SMB environments. As in the previous volumes, each article will not only seek to explain threats and security issues but provide best practices and management guidance to address those threats.

The Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Messaging

Threats against email systems have evolved to the point that protecting users, mail servers and bandwidth is no longer as simple as installing antivirus software. By some estimates, spam, phishing schemes, viruses, and other unwanted content now make up 70% of all email traffic into an organization's mail servers. The Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Messaging by messaging expert Jim McBee introduces IT managers and messaging system administrators to the evolving threat landscape, emerging technologies for data protection, and best practices for protecting users, messaging system resources, and organizational data.

The Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Content Applicances

The purpose of The Tips and Tricks Guide to Secure Content Appliances is to answer common questions about secure content appliances and their role in enterprise security. The guide is divided into four volumes. Each volume is presented in a Q & A format, and discusses the following four topics: Business Justification for Secure Content Appliances, Policies and Procedures for Secure Content Management, System Architecture and Secure Content Management, and Secure Content Appliance Performance. Together the four volumes address the many of the questions that arise when considering the deployment of a secure content appliance.

The Essentials Series: Modern Malware Threats and Countermeasures

Spyware, or its more correct term malware, is an ever-evolving beast of software development that today ties heavily into the desire for financial gain. Malware developers are no longer disgruntled kids writing scripts from the computer in their grandmotherâ€™s basement. Today, malware is big business, and with big business comes software sophistication. The Essentials Series: Modern Malware Threats and Countermeasures discusses how the landscape of malware code has evolved to become a major underground industry. In three articles, it discusses the classes of malware youâ€™re sure to see in the wild today, the behaviors being exhibited by the most intelligent of the bunch, and some of the ways modern tools are employing â€“ or developing â€“ to combat it.

The Essentials Series: Optimizing Your Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Investment

In The Essentials Series: Optimizing Your Windows Server 2008 Active Directory Investment, Microsoft MVP and author Greg Shields discusses the best ways to enhance your investment in Active Directory with the upgrade to Windows Server 2008. This series starts with the key assessment activities that you must complete prior to any upgrade. Sometimes that assessment determines that your AD structure is not aligned with your business needs. In those cases, the second article discusses some of the common issues with AD migrations and restructures. Once the upgrade is complete, getting the most out of your investment means managing it correctly. The third article discusses common AD tasks and how best to simplify your management through automation.

The Essentials Series: Optimizing Database Connection Performance

Database connections are the lifeblood of enterprise applications, administrating the secure and steady flow of information between corporate applications and their persistent relational databases. Optimizing these connections can usher in widespread improvements in information management and improvements in server and network resource utilization.

The Essentials Series: Optimizing Database Connection Performance examines the architecture, resource utilization and scalability of the three most prevalent database connection technologies: Managed .Net, Open Database Connectivity and Java Database Connectivity. It examines the common point of optimization these technologies share and highlights the distinctive challenges that each technology faces to optimize the vital flow of information with the enterprise. These expert articles will help developers, software architects, IT professionals and technologist decipher the characteristics they require for their enterprise database connectivity requirements and provide a critical frame work for making informed choices when choosing and implementing database connectivity software.

The Shortcut Guide to Virtualization and Service Automation

You have read the news stories and seen the promise that virtualization brings to the enterprise data center. In just a few short years, the idea of virtualization and the business benefits it brings has spread to virtually every facet of IT. Whether consolidating servers, individual desktops, the network itself, your critical storage, or the applications that drive your data processing, virtualization is the hot topic throughout Information Technology and its technologies today.

Yet while all of these purported benefits are valid, the smart enterprise recognizes that virtualizationâ€™s promise is only truly achieved when virtualization augments the processing of business. The intent of this guide is to assist the smart enterprise with understanding virtualizationâ€™s fit into the rest of the IT environment. A major part of that fit is in aligning the promise of virtualization technology with the automation benefits associated with virtualization management. What youâ€™ll find in reading this guide is that notwithstanding what technologies and technological improvements virtualization brings to the table, there are a set of management enhancements that also arrive. Those enhancements are a function of the levels of automation that naturally bundles with the move to virtualization.

The Definitive Guide to Building Highly Scalable Enterprise File Serving Solutions

Not only have the challenges that face file serving evolved over the past few years but the methods used to meet those challenges have advanced as well. Today, many organizations view data availability as critical, allowing for very small windows of system downtime. Compounding the problems of maintaining data availability is the sheer volume of data that many organizations must manage.

Written for IT professionals tasked with data center administration and network storage architecture/management duties, The Definitive Guide to Building Highly Scalable Enterprise File Serving Solutions offers expert instruction on maintaining data availability and scaling out existing infrastructure to meet increasing data storage demands.

The How-To Guide to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services

Terminal Servers can be a vital component of any IT Infrastructure. They can be used to replace hundreds of workstations in a homogeneous computing environment or they can be used to complement a workstation-based environment for remote access or disaster recovery. Because of their versatility, and their increased usage in the workplace today, Windows Administrators should be familiar with the technologies that make up a Terminal Server environment as well as the steps needed to install and configure Terminal Services. The How-To Guide to Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services will cover these tasks. It is meant to be not only a manual for learning more about Terminal Services, but also a handy reference guide for system administrators.

The Essentials Series: IT Compliance

The Essentials Series: IT Compliance is an article series focused on regulations, new technologies, and expert techniques for abiding by IT compliance standards. In addition, measures to ensure data protection and enterprise information security are also covered. Each article is Authored by compliance and security expert Rebecca Herold.

The eBooklet Series: An Introduction to Microsoft PowerShell

Forget batch files and set your VBScripts aside: Thereâ€™s a new scripting and automation kid on the block and its name is Microsoft® PowerShell™. Designed from the ground up to be powerful, flexible, consistent, and complete, PowerShell™ promises easier and more efficient Windows and Windows Server System administration. In this short Realtime Publishers eBooklet, An Introduction to Microsoft® PowerShell™, scripting guru Don Jones introduces you to PowerShell™, tells you a bit about how it works, and gives you a sneak peak of PowerShell™ in action. Nowâ€™s the chance to start learning what some are calling â€œthe most significant technology for Windows administrators since the invention of remote control.â€

The Essentials Series: IT Compliance - Volume II

The Essentials Series: IT Compliance - Volume II continues its focus on regulations, new technologies, and addressing challenges presented by IT compliance standards. This brand new set of articles examines topics that are must-knows for all IT professionals and include: identity and access management, messaging gateway security, and application gateway security. Each article in this series is authored by compliance and security expert Rebecca Herold.

The Shortcut Guide to SQL Server Infrastructure Optimization

Are you ready to create an optimized infrastructure for SQL Server? One thatâ€™s agile, ready to respond to changing business needs at a momentâ€™s noticeâ€”without ridiculously high administrative overhead? The time has come. The tools, technologies, and techniques are all in place to create a highly-optimized, business-agile infrastructure that can power SQL Server for years to come. In The Shortcut Guide to SQL Server Infrastructure Optimization, you will learn about the pitfalls of an un-optimized SQL Server infrastructure, and learn about the ways in which your infrastructure can be upgraded and enhanced to be more nimble, more reliable, and even less expensive.

Windows Administration in Realtime

Windows Administration in Realtime is dedicated to educating the Windows Administrator audience on vital technologies and the latest IT trends. Industry veterans such as Don Jones, Greg Shields, J. Peter Bruzzese, and Jeffery Hicks offer their insights through new columns and technical how-toâ€™s geared to help harried Windows Administrators solve everyday issues.

This new eJournal will regularly cover IT topics with a Microsoft focus, such as Windows Server, Vista, PowerShell, and Exchange. It will delve into in-demand technologies like virtualization, proactive systems management and monitoring, and specialized topics like remote application support, and systems security. Windows Administrators will certainly learn a number of valuable tips and tricks along the way.

The Shortcut Guide to Storage Considerations for Microsoft SharePoint

Though Microsoft SharePoint has emerged as a market front-runner in the race to empower business users and provide collaborative systems for decision making, few SharePoint installations live up to the prophecies originally hyped during the buy-in process. The brilliance of any successful enterprise application is its sustainability, not the initial reply to an urgent business need.

The Shortcut Guide to Storage Considerations for Microsoft SharePoint will help bright IT engineers and administrators choose flexible storage for SharePoint that will stand the test of time. The guide examines SharePointâ€™s distinct storage requirements and recommends strategies for determining optimal yet affordable disk solutions that will support your SharePoint investment both now and into the future. Readers will learn about the pitfalls of inadequate storage management, I/O performance enhancements for SharePoint components, and high-availability options combined with data archiving to best manage data bloat. Lastly, an in-depth discussion of best practices for deploying SharePoint onto iSCSI will prepare any enterprise, large or small, which may be ready to ramp up their disk architecture.

The Essentials Series: Understanding and Responding to Network Threats

Networks face a stream of constant and evolving threats while changing in response to business demands for new IT services. This series is designed to help IT managers, network administrators and related decision makers understand the types of threats faced in todayâ€™s online environment and how to evaluate and deploy security products to counter those threats. The Essentials Series: Understanding and Responding to Network Threats series is particularly focused on a comprehensive approach to network security management and products that can effectively address multiple threats.

The Essentials Series: Selecting the Right Network Threat Management Solution

Network threats are multifaceted and so are the security products that can protect your assets. The Essentials Series: Selecting the Right Network Threat Management Solution examines the trade offs of combining off the shelf security products versus network appliances, the role of security management in supporting operational efficiency, as well as methods for evaluating and selecting intrusion prevention systems. These articles bridge the business and technical considerations and offer insights useful to IT managers, network and systems administrators and other decision makers involved with network security.

The Essentials Series: Security Information Management

Maintaining information security is a multi-faceted operation that is best managed with a single comprehensive strategy rather than mix of tactics based on whatever point solutions are already deployed. In The Essentials Series: Security Information Management, readers will learn about the fundamental processes and technologies that support security information management (SIM) operations, as well as the business justification for SIM. The series includes an examination of different options for implementing SIM and evaluation criteria for selecting the best options for a particular organization.

The Essentials Series: Network Troubleshooting and Problem Identification

For the harried network administrator, any tools that automate otherwise manual tasks and quickly take them from problem to resolution are highly desired. Techniques and technologies exist today that make a lot of the otherwise highly-manual activities of the network administrator significantly easier. The Essentials Series: Network Troubleshooting and Problem Identification discusses a few of those tasks along with ways to make them easier.

The first article discusses the need for high-level flow analysis monitoring to augment traditional packet-based monitoring for problem identification. The second article then continues the discussion with a look at tracking down problems between the network and the application. With the right integrated notification solutions in place, finding a problem's source grows easy. The final article moves into the needs for centralized and automated configuration management for the prevention of problems before they happen.

The Essentials Series: The Evolving Landscape of Enterprise Data Protection

Data protection is essential for reliable business operations, but growing data volumes and infrastructure complexity pose significant challenges. Without optimized backup strategies, storage management, and virtual environment management businesses will spend more than needed to protect their information assets.

The Essentials Series: The Evolving Landscape of Enterprise Data Protection provides background in key areas of data protection, including data deduplication strategies, virtual machine management, and meeting application specific data protection requirements. Throughout the articles, a special emphasis is placed on examining the ROI of various options.

The Essentials Series: Infrastructure Management

Infrastructure management enables the delivery of a meaningful, service-oriented approach to IT management. The Essential Series: Infrastructure Management highlights how you can leverage effective infrastructure management to simplify the relationships between key internal IT stake holders, such as storage and information security, and deliver valuable metrics to business partners so that they can make informed decisions about IT investments.

As this article series explores, the technology we deploy today and the methods that we use have dramatically changed over the past 30 years, but the mission remains clear: The infrastructure must improve the quality of service of business processes and reduce operational expenses (through process automation). Learn how to implement infrastructure management to accomplish these goals in a way that is easy for business managers to leverage while minimizing interruptions in service.

The Essentials Series: Enhancing IT Administration with Run Book Automation

Managing your Windows environment is a challenging task. With many computers multiplied by many more configurations, understanding exactly what changes were made, why they were made, and by whom is a task that becomes complex to the point of absurdity. All of these are problems for environments that don't leverage technology like Run Book Automation for Windows. RBA enables the automation of otherwise manual tasks, enabling an easy-to-use platform upon which systems management activities can be run, secured, and delegated. This Essentials Series is designed to help you understand what RBA is and how it can work for the management of systems and users in your environment.

The Essentials Series: Operations Benefits of Email Archiving

Almost every aspect of a typical userâ€™s job revolves around incoming and outgoing email and referencing existing email. Consequently, when email administrators and IT management meet to discuss their future plans, the subjects of eDiscovery and email archiving are common topics.

The Essential Series: Operations Benefits of Email Archiving highlights the principal advantages of an email archive system implementation:

Email archiving is the best way to meet eDiscovery requirements as well as ensure that the organization remains compliant with applicable laws and regulations.
An archive system allows for the eradication of PST files; doing so will help ensure compliance, ease email access for users, and decrease storage requirements for local hard disk drives.
An email archiving system can aid disaster recovery by reducing the amount of data on the production mail server, reducing the time required to recover data, and improving the efficiency of data recovery

The Essentials Series: Code-Signing Certificates

Certificates are for more than just Web servers - and code-signing certificates in particular can make your enterprise more secure, make your software more accepted, and even stop malware in its tracks. Learn about the many ways in which code-signing certificates are being used to create more secure, more trustworthy, and more accepted software in a variety of different scenarios. No matter what kind of software developer or consumer you are, you'll learn how code-signing certificates work, how they're issued, how they're used, how they're secured, and even whether or not there's a difference between certificates issued from different authorities.

The Essentials Series: Containers Virtualization for Linux

Virtualization is a hot topic in todayâ€™s datacenters, yet the type of virtualization that is most familiar to many IT professionals is hardware virtualization. Other architectures exist that can provide added benefits when applied correctly to the right problems. The Essentials Series: Containers Virtualization for Linux attempts to demystify a different type of virtualization commonly called Containers Virtualization. In this architecture, a virtual machine is comprised of the host itself plus each machineâ€™s individual personality differences. The result is near-native performance, significantly lower disk consumption, and real-time adjustment of assigned resources on the fly. If youâ€™re considering virtualization for your Linux workloads, this Essentials Series will help you identify alternatives that may provide added benefit.

The Shortcut Guide to Certificates in the Enterprise

Do you use digital certificates? Not just utilize SSL certificates for Web servers but really use digital certificates in your enterprise? The many ways in which certificates can be employed to improve security, stability, reliability, and more are amazing—and what's equally amazing is how few businesses really leverage these simple, powerful tools.

In The Shortcut Guide to Certificates in the Enterprise, author Don Jones shows you all the ways that certificates can help easily solve common challenges, explains what certificates are and how they work, and offers creative ideas for using certificates effectively.

The Shortcut Guide to Prioritizing Security Spending

Dramatic changes in the economy are arriving at a time when IT infrastructures are becoming more dynamic with the use of virtualization, cloud computing, and distributed information flows across organizational boundaries. IT and business professionals have many options for spending on security, but it is vital to understand these options in relation to their business strategy and operational constraints.

The Shortcut Guide to Prioritizing Security Spending provides a framework for IT professionals and business managers grappling with challenges from an economic downturn to rapidly changing technology options. Any IT professional expected to maintain effective security practices in this increasingly complex environment will find this guide to be an invaluable resource. Topics include leveraging opportunities created by the changing economy, protecting business operations while maintaining staff efficiencies, and making judicious use of virtualization, cloud computing and other technologies for optimizing service delivery.

The Essentials Series: Enhancing Retail Operations with Unified Communications

The Essentials Series: Enhancing Retail Operations with Unified Communications focuses on the importance of VoIP and other unified communications solutions in the retail segment from the perspective of both the large distributed retail organization as well as the smaller business. It explores problems with past communications technologies in the retail industry, and discusses how advances in unified communications integration provide a more competitive environment. The series closes with a look at future technologies coming to retail as part of telecommunications convergence.

The Essentials Series: Virtual Security Concerns & Solutions

Implementing virtualization within the enterprise grows easier with each new version of the virtualization products available on the market. But in implementing virtualization itself, the enterprise adds a set of security risks that are not immediately obvious. Residing virtual machines atop a singular hypervisor puts every virtual egg in a single basket. Virtual machines that experience extended periods of outage may not receive the configuration updates they need to keep them safe. Virtual networks may not provide the level of functionality required by enterprise organizations. All these are topics discussed in this series along with suggestions for solutions that work alongside virtualization platforms to combat these security issues.

The Essentials Series: Enterprise Identity and Access Management

Identity and Access Management is an essential activity for the modern enterprise. Unauthorized access to corporate data can have huge financial implications. However, most organizations maintain multiple directories and multiple access systems, which complicate administration and may compromise security.

The Essentials Series: Enterprise Identity and Access Management starts by looking at identity and how you prove who you are. Once authenticated, you can be authorized to access the corporate data. There are a number of administration challenges in this field especially when multiple identity and access management systems are in use. The series premise is that consolidation on to a single system - namely Active Directory - can resolve these issues and provide a simplified system that is less expensive and more secure. The series closes with a look at the compliance issues surrounding Identity and Access Management and how these issues can be addressed by standardizing and consolidating on to Active Directory.

The Essentials Series: Configuring Microsoft Exchange for Fast Recovery

Microsoft Exchange is the premiere authority for email in todayâ€™s global marketplace. With the impact email has on the workplace and corporate communications, along with the advent of Exchange Server 2007, maintaining an optimal environment is vital. This includes building a resilient environment that can recover from unexpected interruptions.

The Essentials Series: Configuring Microsoft Exchange for Fast Recovery will provide you with the tools for configuring hardware backup and restoration strategies to help return Exchange to full function with minimal downtime.

The Shortcut Guide to Implementing Virtualization in the Small Environment

Virtualization is a big and obvious play in enterprise environments. Its promise of shrinking the data center footprint, reducing costs, and enhancing the workflow of IT and the business make it a perfect fit for environments of size. But small businesses neednâ€™t necessarily be left out in the cold. These smaller environments where no- or low-cost tools are standard and administrators must take broad responsibility rather than specialization stand to gain as well. Yet with so much information in the market todayâ€”much of which is focused on the needs of the large environmentâ€”small businesses and environments have a hard time justifying a move to virtualization.

The Shortcut Guide to Implementing Virtualization in the Small Environment will illuminate the cost savings and the workflow improvements that small businesses and environments will see upon the move to virtualization. By asking and answering a series of four important questions, this guide will pull the reader through the four most critical hurdles that small businesses today must understand to be successful with their virtualization implementations.

The Shortcut Guide to Business Security Measures Using SSL

The Shortcut Guide to Business Security Measures Using SSL examines current information security threats to business and describes techniques for developing a security management strategy that leverages established best practices. Designed for IT professionals and business managers, this guide provides an overview of security threats, their impact on businesses, and, perhaps most importantly, practices and technologies for controlling security risks.

The first chapter begins with a discussion of cybercrime and the business resources targeted by increasingly sophisticated and organized attackers. The second chapter moves to examine how common weaknesses in business processes, such as insufficient use of SSL, leave organizations vulnerable to data breaches and compromised systems. The final two chapters address how to create a high impact security strategy and implement best practices, including multiple uses of SSL technologies, to protect your business.

The Essentials Series: Virtualization and Disaster Recovery

Virtualization has existed for decades, and yet the rate of adoption in recent years has skyrocketed along with the innovative ways that virtualization can be utilized. The Essentials Series: Virtualization and Disaster Recovery discusses the benefit of virtualization in providing for business continuity though data replication and protection, allowing a more cost-effective solution for high availability and disaster recovery.

The Definitive Guide to Building Code Quality

The Definitive Guide to Building Code Quality presents a comprehensive review of modern techniques used to transform raw source code into finished product. In addition to exploring current tools and methods, the guide reviews common techniques and best practices for debugging, testing, and preparing code for commercial release. Throughout, the emphasis is on completeness of coverage in test cases, complete exercise and optimization of code, and use of appropriate procedures and workflows to ensure that changes to code bases are properly recognized, tested, and integrated.

The primary development environment targeted in this book is Visual Studio 2008, but even those who use other development environments and toolsets will find the exploration of code analysis and metrics, taxonomies and illustrations of common coding errors, and automated code optimization techniques to be of great interest. The discussion includes methods to reduce code complexity, make most effective use of resources, analyze code path length, and determine optimal use of code libraries, and predefined objects and methods.

The Shortcut Guide to Understanding Data Protection from Four Critical Perspectives

Too many times publications about data protection are written in such a way that only readers with a deep understanding of information technology (IT) can get value from reading them. The Shortcut Guide to Understanding Data Protection from Four Critical Perspectives is written to serve as a "Rosetta Stone" of data protection for all levels of corporate staff. Each chapter is written in such a way to explain the importance of data protection so that four major roles throughout the enterprise, spanning from executive to IT, will understand. The target audiences includes 1) corporate business leaders (CxO, legal counsel; and other roles with holistic business responsibility), 2) compliance professionals (internal auditors, privacy officers, compliance officers, etc.), 3) IT operations (technology architects, engineers, programmers, and others involved with implementation issues), and 4) security personnel (staff responsible for all aspects of information security and safeguards, including technologies and related options).

The Essentials Series: Managing Workloads in a Virtual Environment

The Essentials Series: Managing Workloads in a Virtual Environment explores the current trends in virtualization, from migration to a virtual infrastructure to trends in virtual data centers. The series discusses the migration process and what to look for in tools for performing migrations. In the second part, the changes to disaster recovery from a physical server to a virtual server are analyzed. The final part of the series expounds upon how these technologies are converging in the next generation virtual data center.

The Essentials Series: Delivering Pervasive User Profiles

Thereâ€™s more to a computer than the sum of its hardware and software components. Over time, you personify that piece of silicon and plastic. You add pictures of fond memories. You keep a record of web sites that are important to you. Even the settings related to your desktop and your printers are customized to your liking. All these elements combine to define the personality of that computer. And without the right tools in place, any replacement or upgrade of it forces your users to start that process over from scratch.

For too long IT organizations have disregarded the comfortable workspace created by the users of computers. Replacing hardware, upgrading operating systems, and adding remote application infrastructures all create entirely new and separate locations where personalization has to begin again. That process takes time, takes away from productive work, and reduces customer satisfaction.

The solution for these problems is to create an environment of pervasive personalization. With such an environment, no matter where your users log in â€“ desktops, laptops, remote applications, recently-replaced hardware â€“ they will experience the same comfortable workspace every time. The Essentials Series: Delivering Pervasive User Profiles will illuminate the power of pervasive personalization, where it fits, and how to make it happen in your environment today.

The Essentials Series: Role of Database Activity Monitoring in Database Security

Network professionals and database administrators both play critical roles in protecting information assets, ensuring a secure environment, and maintaining compliance with regulations. In the past, network and database security practices were fairly independent but that is no longer the case. In today's increasingly complex security environment, network professionals and database administrators must coordinate their activities and share information. This Essential Series outlines best practices for database activity monitoring and describes how to implement an increasingly important technology for meeting business needs that span the networking and database management arenas.

The Essentials Series: Tackling Active Directory's Four Biggest Challenges

Active Directory is pervasive in virtually every Windows environment. Itâ€™s the platform upon which all your users, computers, applications, and data reside. As such, managing it correctly is key to ensuring the health of your entire IT infrastructure. Yet for many, Active Directory is a big, black box. You know how to interact with its common tools like Active Directory Users and Computers. But do you know the best practices for more complex tasks? These critically important tasks like merging and restructuring domains, recovering deleted objects, automatically provisioning new users, and enabling useful auditing arenâ€™t obvious to accomplish, and can be painful to use with Microsoftâ€™s native tools. The Essentials Series: Tackling Active Directory's Four Biggest Challenges will discuss exactly how to accomplish those four tasks with an added conversation about the additional tools you may want to consider in easing the administrative burden of these activities.

The Essentials Series: New Techniques for Creating Better Backups

The world of backups is an essential piece of an IT infrastructure. With new technologies coming online and new issues around data security, the question becomes whether your backups are keeping up. Virtualization presents new challenges to the old agent based network backup, data breaches force you to take a second look at security, and the sheer volume of data puts backup solutions at their breaking points. The Essentials Series: New Techniques for Creating Better Backups takes a fresh look at backup technologies that address these challenges of virtualized servers, options and management of backup encryption, and the benefits of data deduplication for efficient use of backup resources.

The Essentials Series: Increasing Performance in Enterprise Anti-Malware Software

Today's Anti-Malware clients have become bloated suites that often have a negative impact on system performance. Yet, ever increasing security threats require that every system within an enterprise must be protected. The Essentials Series: Increasing Performance in Enterprise Anti-Malware Software offers expert insight into the factors most relevant when evaluating anti-malware solutions, as well as a best practices list to optimize both anti-malware and overall system performance.

The Definitive Guide to Application Performance Management

If one of your servers went down today, would you know about it? Probably. But if an obscure service on a small server that is part of a much larger solution started transacting at a slower rate than normal, would you? Perhaps not. If that obscure service is responsible for a critical activity in your business, its slight reduction in performance might be a big deal that you need to know about!

The Definitive Guide to Application Performance Management offers a comprehensive look at Application Performance Management (APM), an industry-leading mechanism for monitoring business services and applications. APM looks at every facet of the IT infrastructure, from the services to the users themselves, to gain a holistic understanding of whatâ€™s going on in your business applications. Using APM, you can quickly dive into the root causes of problems within your infrastructure. You will understand the level of impact associated with those problems, and will recognize and quantify the overall health of your IT infrastructure and business services.

The Tips and Tricks Guide to Windows Administration

IT gurus Don Jones and Dan Sullivan offer up their expertise to Windows Administrators in a short, tip-focused format that helps you immediately take advantage of the information featured. Walk through installing a Server Core domain controller, secure Windows PowerShell, use a Read-Only Domain Controller, and much, much more...

The Shortcut Guide to Data Center Energy Efficiency

Virtualization and commitments to green IT initiatives are changing the way that data centers operate. By utilizing new technologies, repurposing existing equipment, and matching power and cooling supply to actual data center demand, IT will receive maximum benefit in the form of greater data center energy efficiency and decreased power and cooling costs.

The Shortcut Guide to Data Center Energy Efficiency offers insight on building a data center infrastructure that matches data center power and cooling demands in a way that optimizes operational efficiency while meeting the IT business and computing needs. This eBook will show you methods for minimizing the cost of your operating data center, and lays out a set of specific best practices and considerations for upgrading a production data center.

The Shortcut Guide to Subject Alternative Name Certificates

Most organizations use certificates in some fashion. Web servers, email servers, messaging servers... everything seems to be moving in the direction of public key certificates. But certificates can be costly and confusing to manage, especially with large web farms or email-centric companies. One great solution to this problem is the use of subject alternative name (SAN) certificates.

The Shortcut Guide to Subject Alternative Name Certificates provides information about SAN certificates to show how they can be used in a variety of technologies. These special certificates allow multiple hosts to use the same certificate, avoiding the costs of obtaining, deploying, and managing multiple nearly-identical certificates. This guide will explore what SAN certificates are, how they work, and how they can help you deploy server farms more efficiently. You may even discover that you already have SAN certificates available that can be put to good use with no additional expense!

The Essentials Series: Fulfilling Compliance by Eliminating Administrator Rights

The widespread distribution of administrator rights in an IT infrastructure is not only a problem for security. It can also be the source of major findings during a companyâ€™s regular compliance audit. Due to issues with application design and intra-office politics, many IT organizations find themselves forced to distribute administrator rights to non-administrative personnel. Yet, this expansion of privileges can result in a drain on resources, an increased level of problems, and ultimately a less secure environment.

Does this describe you? Are you interested in the exact regulations that apply towards administrator rights, as well as ways to fulfill their compliance mandates? Then take a look at The Essentials Series: Fulfilling Compliance by Eliminating Administrator Rights. With a tight focus on specific business verticals, youâ€™ll be impressed at how the right tools solve many of the same problems across each set of compliance mandates.

The Executive Guide to Improving Your Business Through IT Portfolio Management

Many corporate executives still view technology as a necessary cost of doing business. As a result, CIOs and IT Directors are constantly struggling to justify their positions and maintain their budgets. However, IT Portfolio Management can change this perception and elevate IT to the status of corporate partner. If you manage technology like any other investment and illustrate the returns and benefits to business leaders, IT becomes a driving force for corporate change and growth.

IT Portfolio Management is a process for directly linking technology with business goals. The Executive Guide to Improving Your Business through IT Portfolio Management will walk you through the IT Portfolio Management model, and suggest ways to transform IT and the role of the CIO into the primary supplier of relevant data to business leaders. This process changes IT from a cost center to a division that directly contributes to the bottom line.

The Definitive Guide to Windows Application and Server Backup 2.0

Are you still making backups the old-fashioned way? Whether you back up Windows, Exchange Server, SharePoint, SQL Server, or virtualization servers, the old-school backup mentality may not be serving your actual needs. In The Definitive Guide to Windows Application and Server Backup 2.0, IT author and Microsoft MVP Don Jones explores the "Backup 1.0" mentality and its shortcomings, and proposes a new "Backup 2.0" way of thinking. He examines the true business needs behind backup (namely, quick recovery and as little lost work as possible), and proposes new techniques - using leading-edge technologies that are available today - that do a better job of meeting today's business and technology needs. With special chapters devoted to Exchange Server, SQL Server, virtualization, and SharePoint, you'll learn about new techniques and technologies designed to take backups out of the 1960's and into the 21st century.

The Essentials Series: Solving Network Problems Before They Occur

At best, network problems are a pain in the neck for IT. At worst, they stand in the way of your business' operations, and ultimately its livelihood. The difference between solving them quickly and standing around scratching your head is all about monitoring your network from the inside out. Cohesive management from a single integrated console with access to information from different sources allows you to correlate problem events fast. This is a critical step in ensuring a healthy network.

Yet network problems aren't just sourced from the network itself. Every networked device on that network, such as servers and desktops, has network components of its own. This means that a fully-realized network management solution must also look to the endpoints in the environment as well. The Essentials Series: Solving Network Problems Before They Occur discusses common solutions to these very network problems—or really, "environment" problems—before they occur. Relating personal experiences from his long history in IT, author Greg Shields offers a look at network integrations from SNMP to WMI to configuration control and reveals the necessity for a complete solution.

The Essentials Series: Mainframe Application Modernization

Are your mainframe applications working as hard as they could? Or, is your mainframe data held hostage by the closed mainframe world? Learn straightforward, practical ways to free your mainframe data to interact with Web applications, modern client applications, and much more, all without recoding your mainframe app or modifying the mainframe in any way. The Essentials Series: Mainframe Application Modernization is the perfect guide for anyone with a mainframe in their environment, and especially those who have wished the mainframe could be a bit more open and connected to the rest of their IT efforts and projects.

The Essentials Series: The Business Benefits of Rapid Application Failover

You know the drill. A critical application fails in your network, and your business grinds to a complete halt. The loss of critical applications from corruption, misconfiguration, power or network loss, or worst-case disasters are major impacts on your business and your job. You need to implement tools that prevent service interruption through rapid and automated failover. The Essentials Series: The Business Benefits of Rapid Application Failover explains the technology behind and business benefits of just those capabilities. In three articles, youâ€™ll learn why and how to implement application failover along with successful failback to keep your critical applications running.

The Essentials Series: Architecting the Right Solution for Strong Authentication

Insufficient security is a hidden problem that many businesses are not fully aware of until it is too late. Weak authentication, silos of compliance reporting, a multitude of management tools, and poor security practices contribute to data breaches and compromised systems and leave organizations vulnerable to other pervasive threats. Fortunately, strong authentication systems can address these issues. A combination of consolidated identity management, single sign-on services, and comprehensive compliance reporting can reduce compliance costs, improve security, and remove significant drag on innovation. The Essentials Series: Architecting the Right Solution for Strong Authentication examines ways in which weak authentication hampers business operations, criteria for selecting a strong authentication system, and tips on how to deploy and manage strong authentication systems to control risks and improve the efficiency of business operations.

The Essentials Series: Why You Need to Defragment

Defragmentation is a problem that has never gone away. Although we might not consider it on a daily basis, defragmentation lurks behind the processing of every server and workstation in our environment. Virtually every bit of disk activity on our computers causes some kind of fragmentation, and every fragment drags down overall performance.

The Essentials Series: Why You Need to Defragment is a call to arms for Windows administrators, reminding them why defragmenting is so important. Defragmentation has been natively available as a service in Windows for many operating system versions; however, many of us have forgotten why defragmentation is critical to our business operations. Simply put, if you don't defragment, processing grinds to a crawl. Through a focus on three key areas, this Essentials Series is presented to assist you in assuring that your systems maintain the lowest levels of fragmentation in order to keep your overall performance optimized, your users happy, and your computers safe.

The Shortcut Guide to Using e-Documents for Collaboration

In today's enterprises, IT departments are faced with a wide array of challenges when it comes to document sharing and collaboration. Keeping costs down, sharing documents across and outside of the enterprise, following compliance and security standards, and optimizing business processes are each high priority concerns when determining a methodology for document creation, collaboration, and exchange. Fortunately, e-document tools are evolving to meet these needs.

The Shortcut Guide to Using e-Documents for Collaboration offers an expert examination into the specific challenges of document creation, collaboration and exchange, as well as how e-Document technology features can be incorporated to address them. Both business requirements (cost savings, environmental concerns, productivity goals, etc.) as well as functional requirements (document creation, data collection, review and approval processes, etc.) are discussed. Lastly, the eBook offers a set of best practices to align business strategy with document and forms management, as well as establish supportive workflow processes and security policies for the entire e-Document creation process.

The Shortcut Guide to Centralized SharePoint Administration

Microsoft SharePoint has emerged as a market leader in satisfying corporate needs for data storage, archiving, collaboration, and delivery due in part to its scalability and customization potential.Â But SharePoint's scalability and customizability can be a double-edged swords, despite the best of deployment or governance plans.Â As in most organic systems, lack of content control can lead to data sprawl, endangering network resources and thwarting your company's ability to make timely strategic decisions.Â In large enterprises the overhead of SharePoint's native decentralized administration tools can quickly undermine scaling advantages.Â

In The Shortcut Guide to Centralized SharePoint Administration, you will learn how to implement reliable data management policies across scaled SharePoint environments with the least amount of administrative overhead.Â Author Wendy Henry will explore data deployment and migration methods as well as content compliance and availability strategies, both native and third party.Â You will gain a deep understanding of the SharePoint administration hierarchy and how it applies to Microsoft's three-tiered administration model for SharePoint.Â You will also learn how to manage access security and data across multiple SharePoint locations.Â The eBook concludes with an informative set of best practices for archiving and reporting on SharePoint data.

The Essentials Series: Configuring High Availability for Windows Server 2008 Environments

System downtime can be very expensive in terms of lost revenue and reputation. Todayâ€™s global markets mean we need our systems to be available at the times our customers want to use them.Â In The Essentials Series: Configuring High Availability for Windows Server 2008 Environments, author and IT expert Richard Siddaway explains the numerous ways to configure high availability for our Windows Server 2008 environments.Â You will learn what is meant by high availability, why it is needed, and its relationship to disaster recovery.Â You will also learn about advances in the failover clustering included with Windows Server 2008, as well as the latest non-native technologies used for Windows Server high availability, including data replication, virtualization, application-controlled high availability, and synchronized systems.

The Essentials Series: Best Practices in Virtual Network Management

Virtualization has disrupted the IT department and put network administrators in a position to service the technology without full reach into all of the networking components. The virtualization software, which is layered with networks in every virtual machine, puts an uncontrolled piece of network equipment into each host. In The Essentials Series: Best Practices for Virtual Network Management, Eric Beehler offers a strong understanding of virtualization so that IT departments may create a consensus for managing the virtual network.

The Essentials Series: Improving Application Performance Troubleshooting

Tired of having your entire team spend hours - or even days - troubleshooting poor performance in a single application? Maybe you should rethink the way you troubleshoot and the tools you use! In The Essentials Series: Improving Application Performance Troubleshooting, IT expert Don Jones explains why up to 80% of application performance problems wind up being "fixed" multiple times by different IT team members - costing companies an average of $45,000 per hour of downtime. You'll learn about new tools and approaches to performance troubleshooting, making your first tier of tech support better able to hand off application problems to the team member who can actually solve them, and helping your entire team quickly and effectively identify root performance issues.

The Essentials Series: Managed Application Failover for the SMB

Application failover provides a critical part of the process for keeping your business running in the face of a technical disaster. The complexity of the process keeps many smaller SMB customers from implementing the necessary hardware and software to take this critical step in becoming a more effective business entity.

In The Essentials Series: Managed Application Failover for the SMB, we will explain the concepts underlying the managed services approach to business continuity issues and provide the reader with the key concepts and critical decision points that need to be hit when choosing to use managed services and selecting a provider.

The Essentials Series: Important Questions in Implementing Virtual Desktops

For organizations that have embraced virtualization, virtual desktops can be a natural extension of the virtual infrastructure. Virtual desktops enable businesses to centralize their desktop infrastructure in the data center, dramatically improving remote access while retaining workspace personality.

Although the idea of virtual desktops and their associated business value is intriguing to many businesses, the implementation is a mystery. Where do you start? What technologies are crucial for success? How are others implementing them? By addressing these common questions, The Essentials Series: Important Questions in Implementing Virtual Desktops will help you understand why and where virtual desktops make sense for your IT environment.

The Essentials Series: Fundamentals of Effective File Server Security

File servers maintain an increasing volume of business critical information. Maintaining the integrity and availability of these resources is a challenge that information technology professionals must rise to meet. The Essentials Series: Fundamentals of Effective File Server Security provides an introduction to the tooling in Windows Server 2008 that can be used to secure a file server, report on the security measures in place, and put in place audit controls to meet regulatory requirements and confirm internal compliance.

The Executive Guide to Service Management in an Uncertain Economy

In an uncertain economy, IT departments can count on two very certain demands: increase productivity and cut costs. When it comes to service management, CFOs, CIOs, and IT managers face the difficult challenge of developing a strategy that is tightly aligned with business goals yet still delivers its services in the most cost-efficient manner possible. In The Executive Guide to Service Management in an Uncertain Economy, author Jeffery Hicks delivers an approach to service management that will show you how to meet the many business requirements of the IT department, such as reduced staff and lower budgets, all while still meeting the IT demands from customers, partners, and compliance organizations. You will learn how to develop an efficient service management strategy focused on effective asset management, data center automation, and management consolidation. You will also receive an action plan for each focus area, providing a checklist of must-do's to execute on your service management strategy.

The Shortcut Guide to Architecting iSCSI Storage for Microsoft Hyper-V

Virtualization is one of the hottest technologies to hit IT in years, with Microsoftâ€™s Hyper-V R2 release igniting those flames even further. Hyper-V arrives as a cost-effective virtualization solution that can be easily implemented by even the newest of technology generalists. But while Hyper-V itself is a trivial implementation, ensuring its highest levels of redundancy, availability, and most importantly performance are not. Due to virtualizationâ€™s heavy reliance on storage, two of the most critical decisions you will make in implementing Hyper-V are where and how youâ€™ll store your virtual machines.

With the entry of enterprise-worthy iSCSI solutions into the market, IT environments of all sizes can leverage the very same network infrastructure theyâ€™ve built over time to host that storage. This already-present network pervasiveness combined with the dynamic nature of virtualization makes iSCSI a perfect fit for your storage needs. But correctly connecting all the pieces, however, can be a challenge. To help, The Shortcut Guide to Architecting iSCSI Storage for Microsoft Hyper-V digs deep into the decisions that environments large and small must consider. It looks at best practices for Hyper-V storage topologies and technologies, as well as cost and manageability implications for the solutions available on the market today.

The Shortcut Guide to Improving Government Services Through Unified Communications

The Shortcut Guide to Improving Government Services Through Unified Communications focuses on four facets of unified communications technologies in terms of the value and impact each brings to government services at the local, state, and federal levels. This informative new book reviews how self-service applications can improve customer satisfaction, increase revenue, decrease costs, and enable resource sharing across government agencies. It uncovers the value in teleworking programs and technologies. It explores contact center solutions to improve communications both internally and with citizens. And lastly, this book addresses how government officials and organizations are using emerging social media networking tools to provide enhanced services to citizens.

The Essentials Series: Making High Availability Pay For Itself

Not only has technology changed the way we do business, it has changed the way we view the ability to do business. Users and clients expect unprecedented levels of availability from applications and services, forcing businesses to contend with growing requirements to keep availability at its highest levels. But providing this level of availability doesnâ€™t have to break the bank. The Essential Series: Making High Availability Pay For Itself provides IT decision makers with metrics, solutions and the vision to present high availability as a business value.

The Shortcut Guide to Availability, Continuity, and Disaster Recovery

It is only a matter of time before human error, hardware failure, natural disaster, or any other adverse condition throws a wrench into your perfectly running IT operation. Learning how to recover and maintain your critical business systems during these adverse conditions is vital to delivering on the increased demands for high availability. The Shortcut Guide to Availability, Continuity, and Disaster Recovery is a concise roadmap to uncovering the not-so-obvious business requirements of recovery management and meeting some of the most vexing challenges to traditional backup models, including virtualization and application-specific requirements. This excellent new book offers concrete advice on scheduling and monitoring, choosing storage media, managing growth, and controlling costs. With the right combination of backup systems, high-availability solutions, and sound recovery management procedures, businesses can have the backup protection they need without straining their staff or budget.

The Shortcut Guide to Achieving Business Intelligence in Midsize Companies

Do you think business intelligence is only for massive enterprises? In the past, that may have been the case, but new techniques are quickly driving business intelligence to small- and medium-sized businesses - with amazing effects. There's no longer any need to run your business on intuition when affordable, modular business intelligence systems can give you hard facts, help answer "what if" questions, and tie back into your business planning systems to help make implementation easier and more effective. In The Shortcut Guide to Achieving Business Intelligence in Midsize Companies, author Don Jones introduces you to the key concepts of business intelligence, including data modeling, data warehouses, OLAP, and more, and explains how the same techniques and technologies used by the "big boys" are now available to small- and medium-sized businesses who don't want, or can't afford, multi-month implementations that require hordes of specialized consultants.

The Shortcut Guide to Secure, Managed File Transfer

Every company in the world moves files around - between systems, between business partners, and between employees. But not many companies do so securely or in a managed fashion that supports auditing, compliance, automation, and workflow. In The Shortcut Guide to Secure, Managed File Transfer you'll learn about traditional and emerging concerns related to file transfers, including the ad-hoc, person-to-person file transfers that are often the least managed, least secure, and least visible way in which your company's sensitive data moves around. You'll also learn about the modern solution space for securing and managing file transfers, and learn how to define your company's unique business needs and evaluate solutions to provide more security, more automation, better workflow, and better reliability.

The Essentials Series: Automation Tools for Windows 7 Migration

Considering a migration to Windows 7? Without the right tools, it might be harder than you think. What many administrators don't recognize is that the central hurdle in migrating to Windows 7 lies not in actually installing its bits to your hardware. Much more challenging are the activities that surround the install. There are seven key migration activities that must occur to be successful with a Windows 7 migration, all of which you'll learn about in The Essentials Series: Automation Tools for Windows 7 Migration by Greg Shields.

The Shortcut Guide to User Workspace Management

Today's computing environments are growing more complex every day.Â Just a few years ago, the standard was one computer for every employee.Â But with today's operating system upgrades, remote application infrastructures, VPN connections, desktop sharing, and hosted virtual desktops, a user's personal computer isn't all that personal any more.

One central problem with this ever-widening architecture is in maintaining the user's workspacesâ€”the personal bits and pieces that make a computing environment comfortable for the userâ€”each infrastructure.Â Using today's Windows profiles to manage user workspaces just doesn't cut it, and certainly doesn't provide enough administrative control to scale well.Â In The Shortcut Guide to User Workspace Management, you will learn about the benefits and challenges of managing user workspaces, as well as why a User Workspace Management solution is an absolute must for today's multiple access point environments

The Definitive Guide to Cloud Computing

Cloud computing has clearly emerged as a viable means for delivering IT services. Less obvious, though, is how to identify the potential role of cloud computing in your organization and adapt this new model of service delivery. The Definitive Guide to Cloud Computing provides IT managers, system architects, and IT service consumers with the information they need to understand the advantages of cloud computing, the options for deploying cloud infrastructure, and the means to transition to cloud-based service delivery. This Definitive Guide provides a road map to implementation that starts with defining key characteristics of cloud computing and moves through identifying, planning, and implementing cloud service delivery. Other critical topics, such as governance, security, and growth are addressed as well.

Eliminating Insecure and Unreliable File Transfer Methods

Transferring files often appears to be a simple task that is easily scripted. As a result, many organizations are littered with quickly written, insecure and difficult to maintain file transfer scripts. In The Shortcut Guide to Eliminating Insecure and Unreliable File Transfer Methods, author Dan Sullivan outlines the limits and shortcomings of home grown file transfer solutions along with business drivers that are motivating organizations to better manage all file transfers. This book closes with a detailed list of features essential to a dependable file transfer solution and offers guidance on how to deploy such a solution.

The Shortcut Guide to Assuring Website Performance through External Web Monitoring

For most businesses running today, Web sites have become the new storefronts and office buildings.Â Businesses have become increasingly dependent on Web sites and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to conduct commerce with customers, keep tabs on internal resources, and communicate with partners, suppliers, and employees.Â But as this dependency increases, so does the complexity of the Web site system and the expectations on the system's level of service delivery. So how can businesses ensure that their applications are always functioning as expected?

The Shortcut Guide to Assuring Website Performance through External Web Monitoring addresses this question with a comprehensive overview of the technical and business issues driving the need for external monitoring.Â This book offers a detailed look at the essential components of external monitoring, a discussion of how to leverage external monitoring to protect your brand, and finally, a roadmap for implementing and maintaining an external monitoring process.

The Shortcut Guide to Large Scale Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics

As data warehouses grow to 10 TB and beyond, the means by which they are designed and operated, and even the way in which analytics are executed, must change in order to maintain high levels of performance. The Shortcut Guide to Large-Scale Data Warehousing and Advanced Analytics explores the rationale for large-scale data warehouses, as well as the architectural alternatives for building them. It addresses the operational challenges of managing and monitoring these large data warehouses, and takes a fresh look at how to extract meaningful information from a data set of this size.

The Essentials Series: Building a More Energy-Efficient Data Center

Today's businesses are trying harder and harder to squeeze the maximum efficiency out of their data centers, and increasing energy efficiency is one of the best ways to do so. Traditionally, even measuring power and cooling consumption in the data center has been a frustrating, inexact science full of guesstimates and boilerplate "statistics." Moving forward, companies need to clearly define their business drivers, accurately and efficiently measure both energy consumption and server utilization, and enable themselves to make smart decisions about capacity, energy efficiency, and utilization. In this Essential Series, authored by renowned business technology expert Don Jones, readers will learn how to clearly state business goals for data center efficiency, and how to use modern tools and techniques to clearly, simply, and accurately measure utilization and capacity.

The Essentials Series: Faster Problem Resolution with Remote Support Capabilities

No one would argue that the today's modern help desk staff has an easy job. In addition to operating on reduced budgets and lower staff counts, a typical help desk staff must now support mobile users working from home, customer sites, or on the road. In these situations, an effective, user-centric remote control solution is an absolute must in order to establish and manage user PCs remotely, to diagnose and repair problems, and to teach users how to make the most of their systems and software.

In The Essentials Series: Faster Problem Resolution with Remote Support Capabilities, Ed Tittel takes you through the many issues that plague the modern help desk, and states the case for implementing user-centric remote support. He demonstrates how tools such as built-in interactive chat, file transfer, and sessions that persist across multiple reboots enable help desk staff to be supportive and to identify and resolve problems quickly and accurately. Lastly, Ed offers insight on how built-in monitoring and behind-the-scenes session sharing and observation tools let management accurately assess help desk productivity, help desk staff skills and abilities, and ticket resolution rates.

The Shortcut Guide to Untangling the Differences Between High Availability and Disaster Recovery

Solutions and systems that address High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) have been paramount in preventing application downtime and its crippling effect on productivity and operational output. But the traditional differences between HA and DR have been blurred by new mechanisms introduced by emerging technologies. And while it is possible to provide HA and DR together, there are cases when it is important to keep the two activities separate in order to guarantee 24X7 access to business applications.

In The Shortcut Guide to Untangling the Difference Between High Availability and Disaster Recovery, author and IT expert Richard Siddaway examines HA and DR, and explains how understanding the many differences between the two will allow you to create a proper system to guard against application downtime. Siddaway offers his insight not only on how technology can be used in HA and DR solutions, but also how management of the human element must factor into any successful HA / DR solution.

The Shortcut Guide to Smart Network Management for the SMB

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are facing tough times in today's economy. Because of tighter budgets, many businesses must demand more from the investments they have made in Information Technology. Thus, there is an immediate need for networks to work smarter, not harder. This means that devices and systems on the network must maintain availability and continue performing efficiently at no additional cost to the business and the users. The challenge is daunting â€“ from critical messaging systems to high-density virtual infrastructures, an administrator needs to discover, monitor, and track availability and performance across every device and system. The Shortcut Guide to Smart Network Management for the SMB provides an analysis of these challenges and a clear understanding of how smart network management can meet them.

The Definitive Guide to Monitoring the Data Center, Virtual Environments, and the Cloud

It's only recently that businesses have started focusing on modern application performance management techniques, and along comes cloud computing and other "hybrid IT" elements (such as Software as a Service) to make application performance even more complicated. How can you possibly manage the performance of applications and application components that reside outside your own network? Or, if you're a Managed Service Provider (MSP), how can you help your customers manage the performance of their hybrid applications? In The Definitive Guide to Monitoring the Data Center, Virtual Environments, and the Cloud by business technology writer and analyst Don Jones, you'll see how application performance management techniques need to evolve to accommodate hybrid IT. You'll learn about emerging techniques and technologies, and develop a "shopping list" of capabilities that your IT environment will need in order to survive in the Hybrid Age.

The Essentials Series: Strategies for Cloud Storage, Data Protection, and Disaster Recovery

Too many of today's businesses â€“ especially smaller and mid-sized companies â€“ are placing enormous trust in antiquated data protection schemes: Backup tapes stored in a fire safe, or in the trunk of someone's car, does not constitute a disaster recovery scheme or even a data protection plan. In fact, most companies’ disaster recovery tools do very little the meet the company's actual business needs, like quickly recovering the most critical data in the event of a failure. In The Essentials Series: Strategies for Cloud Storage, Data Protection, and Disaster Recovery, IT author and strategist Don Jones examines the new approaches and capabilities offered by cloud storage and cloud-based data protection solutions. He offers a look at these solutions' challenges, and outlines specific considerations that businesses have to keep in mind when using them. Finally, he provides a framework for basic storage strategies that incorporate cloud technologies, positioning you to begin researching a solution that truly meets your business needs.

The Five Essential Elements of Application Performance Monitoring

Businesses are driving their IT operations managers to improve performance and boost productivity by becoming increasingly application-centric, a radical change of the infrastructure-centric approach that IT has had for years. At the same time, however, applications themselves are becoming increasingly difficult to manage as they move toward highly-distributed, multi-tier, multi-element constructs that in many cases rely on application development frameworks such as Microsoft .NET or Java.

In The Five Essential Elements of Application Performance Monitoring, author and renowned business technology expert Don Jones shows you the 5D Framework, an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) approach that helps businesses achieve this new application-centric focus. Â You will learn how to improve application performance from the perspective of the business and the end user by constructing a 5D-compatible approach to APM within your own environment.Â Jones offers an informative discussion of new tools and techniques that are enabling new, more effective forms of APM, and closes the book with a set of evaluation criteria for APM tools, based on the 5D approach.

Data Protection and Compliance in Complex Environments

Today's businesses are often under the gun to meet certain data protection requirements. Unfortunately, many companies lack a cohesive strategy for assimilating, managing, and protecting that data. New regulatory requirements are often placed upon businesses with stiff penalties for noncompliance, with equally demanding deliverable dates. Global organizations are even more complex due to international laws. In The CSO Executive Series: Data Protection and Compliance in Complex Environments by information security expert and author Kevin Beaver, readers will learn how to clearly classify, protect, and report on critical data that requires the highest due diligence and protection efforts.

Intelligently Reducing SharePoint Costs Through Storage Optimization

Every SharePoint administrator knows the challenge of dealing with SharePoint: The business wants to put everything in SharePoint so that as much data as possible is centrally located and managed; doing so, however, bloats the SharePoint SQL database and creates an administrative nightmare. How can you find your happy medium? How can you get as much data as possible into SharePoint - searchable, version-controlled, and secured - while keeping your database as trim as possible? The answer is storage optimization, and it's the subject of this book by noted industry expert Don Jones. You'll learn how to optimize SharePoint for the inclusion of large content items, external content items (like databases, shared files, and media files), and even "dormant" content that you no longer actively need - but can't afford to get rid of.

Creating a Small Business Website Your Customers Will Trust

You own a small business, perhaps even a micro business.Â Maybe you're a plumber, or you sell customized golf balls.Â But while you're good at what you do, you're not necessarily a highly-technical person.Â You want to expand that business into the online world, but you're not quite sure how to do so in a way that your customers will trust it.Â This Essentials Series explains the surprising similarities between offline and online businesses, showing you the seven reasons why your customers do business.Â It continues with a look at what's primarily important to every business customer:Â The assurance of trust, and how reputation, visibility, and professionalism create that trust.

The Administrator Crash Course: Windows PowerShell v2

By now you've probably gotten the message loud and clear that Windows PowerShell is pretty important; Microsoft is adding it to more and more products, and going forward, the company's plan is to incorporate PowerShell throughout all of its business products as a baseline administrative layer. For windows administrators who are new to PowerShell, Microsoft MVP Don Jones offers a new book entitled The Administrator Crash Course: Windows PowerShell v2. Covering the most crucial elements of PowerShell v2, Don has constructed a set of practical tips and practice exercises that will get you up to speed in a matter of weeks. Each course section is designed to be reviewed in under an hour, so it's a perfect way to quickly learn how to begin using PowerShell v2!

Strengthening Application Security with Identity Fraud Prevention Systems

Can having a friendly conversation in a public place make you or your business a target for identity fraud?Â By inadvertently revealing personal information in such settings, anyone can open the door for identity theft, especially when standard knowledge-based authentication challenges and responses follow a set of "canned" replies to simple questions: your mother's maiden name, your first pet's name, your first car.Â In this new Essential Series entitled Strengthening Application Security with Identity Fraud Prevention Systems, IT expert and author Ken Hess shows you how to protect your clients from identity theft using new methods of verification and authentication.Â You will learn how to overcome regulatory compliance concerns surrounding knowledge-based authentication and verification and determine whether your current (or proposed) identity fraud prevention system will scale to meet future risks.

Building Business Productivity with Unified Communications

Any business that has experienced growth in the past decade has faced the problems and inefficiencies of the expanding network. Such expansion has put a strain on IT managers to figure out how to seamlessly (and inexpensively) connect multiple locations, communicate with off-site business partners, and manage mobile workers. In The Essentials Series: Building Business Productivity with Unified Communications, renowned business technology expert Ken Camp reveals how new unified communications strategies can eliminate unnecessary costs by unifying the requisite voice and data services and extending them to multiple locations. Ken goes on to clearly demonstrate how any business can use enhanced communications tools to greatly improve customer satisfaction and dramatically increase worker productivity.

Monitoring, Detecting, and Preventing Insider Fraud and Abuse

Some of the most significant risks to a business come from within. Insiders can commit fraud, intellectual property theft, sabotage, and privacy breaches using their legitimate access privileges and knowledge of business functions. When insiders collude with others or use their technical knowledge to tamper with security controls, it can be even more difficult to detect and prevent abuse. However, advances in data analysis are providing tools for collecting application activity from mainframes, Web applications, and other platforms; correlating events across multiple systems; and detecting patterns of suspicious activity. In Realtime Publishers' new book Monitoring, Detecting, and Preventing Insider Fraud and Abuse, author and security expert Dan Sullivan discusses catastrophic effects that can occur from insider abuse, and reveals effective techniques for countering them. The book concludes with a must-have overview for evaluating and selecting the correct tools to help you monitor, detect, and prevent insider abuse.

Why Native Windows Defragmentation Isn't Enough

Every modern version of Windows includes its own built-in defragmentation solution. A native part of the operating system, this defragger indeed can and will remove fragmented files, folders, and data on a Windows computer. Yet while it provides basic functionality, that native solution lacks in key capabilities that are necessary for the enterprise organization. Policy-based configuration is severely limited; enterprise monitoring and alerting are non-existent; performance is not well-tuned to the needs of servers; centralized control isnâ€™t included. Exacerbating the situation, the native defragger is in fact a reactive solution. It fixes problems only after theyâ€™ve already occurred. Maintaining performance and reducing the opportunity for corruption requires a proactive approach, one that includes the necessary administrative tools, and one that prevents fragments from occurring in the first place. This Essentials Series entitled Why Native Defragmentation Isn't Enough will explain why that approach is necessary, and how to achieve it.

Endpoint Data Encryption That Actually Works

Many businesses have tried endpoint data encryption, often opting for full-disk encryption (FDE) solutions. Unfortunately, many of those businesses quickly realize that their encryption solution isn't fully-compatible with their IT management systems and process - and often aren't compatible with their users, either! In this series of concise articles, IT expert Don Jones analyzes the reasons why encryption systems typically present so many unforeseen challenges, and examines the capabilities and processes you should look for in an endpoint encryption system that will actually be usable by your business and employees.

Private Clouds: Selecting the Right Hardware for a Scalable Virtual Infrastructure

Private clouds are quickly becoming an effective means of stretching infrastructure to meet growing application needs. But the definition of the term "private cloud" can be somewhat elusive. What exactly is meant by "private cloud"? How do you build one? Once you have a private cloud, what is the benefit for the application consumer? And, finally, how can modular hardware make a cloud infrastructure dead simple for even the most complex of enterprise needs. All of these topics are addressed in Private Clouds: Selecting the Right Hardware for a Scalable Virtual Infrastructure. In it, author Greg Shields reveals how the use of the private cloud enables an enterprise to gain flexibility in application delivery as well as enhanced availability in keeping applications running. You will see first-hand a high-level reference architecture for creating a private cloud, along with a detailed explanation of where the modular hardware approach eliminates risk while reducing complexity. Finally, you'll see the business case for building your own private cloud using modular hardware, proving that today's virtualization infrastructures no longer need to be built from scratch like yesteryear's "white box" servers.

Automating Windows 7 Installation for Desktop and VDI Environments

Installing Windows 7 isn't just about migrations. It's about daily management. It's about rapid deployment to fix problems. It's about provisioning virtual desktops in a VDI infrastructure. With today's technologies for user virtualization and application virtualization, fixing some IT problems can be fastest accomplished by simply rebuilding the computer. For all of these reasons, the outwardly simple process of installing Windows grows to become a much more critical activity than ever before. Installing Windows through automated means is even more important. That's why this book exists. While installing Windows the manual way requires as few as seven clicks and a bit of time, fully automating its installation requires quite a bit more effort. You need a project plan to get you started and a cookbook of step-by-step solutions to finish the job.

In Automating Windows 7 Installation for Desktop and VDI Environments, you'll deep dive into the steps required to automate Windows 7 installation. But you won't stop there. You'll dig deep into the ways in which that automated installation will fundamentally change how you do IT. You'll learn exactly how to automate Windows for an OS migration project, whether from Windows XP or Windows Vista. You'll discover the steps to wrap your automated installation into a VDI infrastructure, enabling virtual desktops to be provisioned automatically and on-demand. You'll learn the tips and tricks for layering the Windows OS, enabling you to fix common IT problems by simply rebuilding the user's computer - all while maintaining their applications and profile information and without needing to resort to roaming profiles.

Keep this book handy. You will find yourself turning back to it again and again as you fully automate one of the most time-consuming parts of your job: Windows 7 Installation.

How to Install SSL Certificates on Microsoft Servers

Windows administrators are continually tasked with securing servers and applications, including installing SSL certificates for authentication and encryption. This raises a number of questions for system administrators: which kind of SSL certificate should be used? How are SSL certificates installed? What is the Certificate Store? How does SSL work in Internet Information Server (IIS), Exchange Server, Â SQL Server and SharePoint?Â This how-to guide provides detailed step by step instructions on how to select, install and maintain SSL certificates in Microsoft environments. Whether you are just starting out and need to know how to acquire a certificate, or you are looking for tips on troubleshooting and maintaining existing certificate configurations, this guide has pragmatic and detailed information to help you.

The Essentials Series: Using Cloud Services to Improve Web Security

Companies entrust their security systems with a great deal of responsibility. Such systems must protect corporate assets from an unending proliferation of online attack, abide by regulatory compliance standards, monitor all legal exposure to stockholders and employees alike, and keep intellectual property from leaking through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media outlets. In The Essentials Series: Using Cloud Services to Improve Web Security, author and IT expert Mike Danseglio explains many of these new threats and security requirements, and explores how Web security delivered through cloud services can address them. In addition to discussing the many concerns and questions over cloud-based security, Danseglio offers a number of cloud-based approaches, including protection strategies for mobile workers and portable devices. This series closes with a discussion of how Web security delivered through cloud services differs from large, on-site security infrastructures, and how this new setup can deliver cost-efficient and seamless protection against the dynamic attack landscape.

The Tips and Tricks Guide to Managed File Transfer

Too many businesses are trusting critical data and processes to home-grown, do-it-yourself, insecure, unreliable, and manual processes. When your company needs to move and process important information - and protect it while doing so â€” you need a business-class solution that has been specifically designed to meet those important business needs. That's what true Managed File Transfer is all about: Managing files as they transit your organization and your partners', managing those files through post-transfer processes, and securing and tracking those files to help you meet both internal and external security requirements. IT expert Don Jones introduces you to some of the key differentiators with Managed File Transfer, helps you understand core capabilities and subtle implementation variations, and shows you how to construct a shopping list of capabilities that you need for your environment.

Active Directory Troubleshooting - Best Practices

Loaded with valuable information about Active Directory (AD), The Definitive Guide to Active Directory Troubleshooting, Auditing and Best Practices shares best practices, tips and tricks, step-by-step testing procedures, and diagnostic approaches that will help you to ensure the reliability and performance of your directory. You'll also learn the latest techniques and practices for auditing Active Directory, learn best practices for managing and operating AD, and much more.

The Essentials Series: Security Management Tactics for the Network Administrator

Today's IT budget is tight. Determining how to meet growing demands for IT services and features while controlling spending is challenging. Interestingly, many organizations have widely deployed tools that can be used for more than one purpose. The administrators and technologists often have the tools at their fingertips to deliver on demands while keeping budgets flat and minimizing their own efforts.

Your own organization's IT assets may fit in this category today, especially if you have an effective network management infrastructure in place. In The Essentials Series:Â Security Management Tactics for the Network Administrator you will learn about the similarities between effective network and security management. You'll see that many network monitoring and management tools, including event log management and event analysis tools, can be used very effectively for both security and management tasks. What you learn might just enable you to provide amazing network security and management functions today.

Solutions for Automating IT Job Scheduling

Every IT department is well aware of the challenges associated with trying to coordinate tasks across disparate technologies and solutions.Â Customer files coming in via a Linux FTP server need to be ingested into a SQL database.Â Provisioning Active Directory users requires too many manual steps across too many disparate systems.Â New records in a Microsoft SQL database must trigger an action to occur in a middleware system.Â Even the most configuration controlled IT organization must manage lots of little products that somehow need to interact. Â Since IT technologies are rarely in the habit of communicating seamlessly with one another, the use of so many disparate technologies can create one unified (and massive) headache.Â Fortunately, that headache can be alleviated with the use of automated job scheduling.

In Solutions for Automating IT Job Scheduling, author and IT expert Greg Shields presents a set of questions that will frame your need for job scheduling.Â Greg delivers a set of real-world use cases for seeing scheduling in action.Â He deconstructs an IT workflow, so you can peer inside to see its internal machinery.Â The book concludes with a checklist of requirements you should consider when seeking a solution for job scheduling.

The Essentials Series: Cloud-Enabling Legacy and Mainframe Applications

For all of the hype surrounding it, cloud computing is a real thing and it's here to stay. In fact, today's businesses are increasingly called upon to expose business data in cloud-centric ways: On mobile devices, as Web services to internal and external consumers, and more. Exposing legacy data comes with significant challenges and risks, and businesses are justifiably cautious in doing so. New technologies and techniques are available that give businesses more control, less risk, and lower costs when it comes to integrating legacy application data with the cloud, and in The Essentials Series: Cloud-Enabling Legacy and Mainframe Applications, author and analyst Don Jones explores these new options.

Securing Your Exchange Server Using SSL

Exchange Server specifically, and Unified Communications in general, have become increasingly critical components of organizations' infrastructure. They're also carrying increasingly-sensitive information to a growing variety of devices. No longer can we rely on the protection of our intranet to keep these communications safe and private: Our communications now reach well beyond the local network. SSL offers a way to secure the vast majority of our communications, but in modern, multi-server organizations, they can come with a high amount of cost and overhead. In this guide, you'll learn how to use Subject Alternative Name (SAN) certificates to provide the security you need, with less cost and overhead. You'll also learn about other best practices for securing Exchange and Unified Communications platforms, including Microsoft Lync Server, mobile device management, and more.

The Essentials Series: Deploying and Managing Private Clouds

Cloud computing offers substantial cost and performance advantages over other IT architectures. Public cloud providers meet some but not all enterprise requirements and this has led to the adoption of internal or private clouds. Migrating existing infrastructure to a private cloud architecture requires distinct planning, assessment, and deployment tasks. The Essential Series: Deploying and Managing Private Clouds outlines planning steps to migrating to cloud architecture, provides tips and best practices for accomplishing these tasks, and discusses particularly challenging areas of private cloud management such as security, troubleshooting and monitoring.

The Essentials Series: VDI or Desktop Virtualization: What's Right for You?

Confused about that title?Â You might be.Â VDI and desktop virtualization aren't necessarily the same thing.Â In reality, VDI is but one of many ways in which desktops can be virtualized.

And that's exactly one of the fallacies with our industry's fascination with VDI.Â VDI represents an approach to desktop delivery, in much the same way as deploying physical desktops.Â The difference with VDI is in the centralization.Â VDI deployments centralize desktops in the data center and enable IT to act as a service provider.Â From this location, IT gains a set of operational efficiencies over the traditional physical approach.

Yet what many who are considering VDI don't realize is that IT gains some benefits while losing others.Â Users also tend to lose in the deal as well.Â VDI desktops function well for task workers who consume static application sets.Â But when those workers move offline, or outside the brick-and-mortar office, VDI's limitations grow much more clear.Â Attempt to push Adobe Flash, video, or voice over the network and users will quickly discover the use cases where VDI doesn't make sense.

This contrast is the subject of this Essentials Series.Â In it, you'll understand what desktop virtualization really aims to accomplish, and what other approaches are available that might better work in your situation.Â That's not to say that VDI isn't a solution for many use cases; it just isn't the answer for all of them.Â In this journey, you'll come to understand one approach specifically â€” Hybrid Desktop Virtualization â€” that combines the best of the others to merge IT's centralization desires with users' real-world requirements.

The Essentials Series: Simplified High-Performance Computing for Everyone

High-Performance Computing (HPC) is one of the most interesting developments in the information technology (IT) industry in the past few years. It's also one of the most-overlooked. Essentially, HPC enables an organization to harness massive computing power by distributing workloads across numerous relatively-inexpensive computers. Rather than investing millions in a supercomputer, you simply aggregate the power of multiple PC-based servers-often "commodity" servers-built using standardized components and architectures. Adding computing power is as easy as adding new servers to the HPC cluster.

In this brief entitled Simplified High-Performance Computing for Everyone, author and IT expert Don Jones offers the basics of High-Performance Computing and explains how it is helping organizations of all kinds churn through incredible amounts of data much faster. He cuts through the complexity of HPC, offering a high-level view of how it can help your company, and how to properly prepare for implementation.

Topics include:

What Is HPC?
Assessing Your HPC Needs
Other Components Youâ€™ll Need
Don't Forget the Storage
Getting the Right Software
Making It All Work Together
HPC: Ready for Your Organization

The Essentials Series: Taking a Fresh Look at Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

For the longest time, organizations' approach to disaster recovery was simple: back up as much as possible, as often as possible, and hope that you never need the backups. In the past few years, businesses have become a bit more proactive and demanding. Instead of asking, "How will we recover from this disaster?" they're asking "How can we keep our business running through the disaster?" Commonly referred to as business continuity, this desire forces us to take a fresh look at how we keep our systems up and running. Although the "fail and recover" approach will always be part of our layered business protections, it can't always be the first layer because in order to use a backup, something first has to fail-which isn't always an acceptable option. In this brief, entitled Taking a Fresh Look at Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery, author and IT expert Don Jones expands upon the need to discard the one-size-fits-all approach of "just back it up," and start thinking about business continuity approaches that are tailored to specific services within the organization.

Topics include:

Email Continuity
Server Clusters
Application Continuity
Rapid Restore
Virtualization and Off-Site Recovery
Emergency Management
Business Continuity for the Modern Age

The Essentials Series: Resolving VMware vSphere's Six Biggest Performance Issues

VMware vSphere is a complicated beast. Because of its moving parts and deep integrations, maintaining vSphere's performance can become a never-ending exercise in capacity management, requiring constant monitoring. To monitor and maintain high performance, vSphere offers over a hundred metrics and counters exposed in the vCenter Client. The hard part, however, is in understanding which counters are useful for recognizing resource capacity, and which counters simply muddy up the water. In The Essentials Series: Resolving VMware vSphere's Six Biggest Performance Issues, author and virtualization expert Greg Shields introduces you to an important set of useful counters that will clearly quantify the behavior of vSphere. Furthermore, he will introduce actionable intelligence that an administrator can use to glean actual resolutions from the raw data.

The Essentials Series: Preventing Data Loss Through Unsecure Browsers

Data loss possesses a constant risk for any business that utilizes a web browser interface...which is nearly every business. Information transferred to a client device is vulnerable to key loggers, video frame grabbers, and other malware attacks. Authorized users can maliciously steal confidential information, and unauthorized users may unintentionally leak private data. To mitigate these issues, IT departments can secure corporate servers and encrypt data transmissions. But sometimes, this is not enough. The user browser presents a weak link in what may otherwise be a strong chain of security. Fortunately, technologies are available to provide on demand, session-based browser security. In The Essential Series: Preventing Data Loss through Unsecure Browsers, security expert Dan Sullivan outlines the threats of unsecure browsers to data loss, and describes methods for protecting Web applications from client-side data loss due to malware or malicious user activity.

Implementation Strategies for Fulfilling and Maintaining IT Compliance

Businesses are struggling more and more with the compliance requirements being pushed on them from every angle. The reality is that such regulations aren't going away. However, thereâ€™s a silver lining â€“ IT compliance doesnâ€™t have to be that difficult and once you've mastered compliance it can serve as a business enabler and competitive differentiator. In Implementation Strategies for Fulfilling and Maintaining IT Compliance, a practical guide on real-world issues related to IT compliance, the reader will find reasonable solutions for the professionals responsible for making things happen. It's great for anyone faced with implementing the standards mandated by regulations such as HIPAA, HITECH Act, GLBA, SOX, and PCI DSS. CIOs, compliance officers, IT directors and network administrators can all benefit from the anecdotal stories, down-to-earth strategies and sage advice for creating gaining and maintaining control of IT compliance so that it can enable rather than hinder the business moving forward.

Desktop Virtualization and Evolving Strategies for IT Service Delivery

Desktop virtualization seems like the next natural step in the recent trend toward infrastructures that aren't directly tied to hardware; however desktop virtualization and VDI are part of a larger end user service delivery goal, but not necessarily the entire solution. Recent positive experiences with server virtualization have led IT managers to assume that the results of service delivery will be the same for VDI. But this may not be the case.

In Desktop Virtualization and Evolving Strategies for IT Service Delivery, virtualization expert and author Jaime Halscott reveals the many challenges of implementing a desktop virtualization strategy, and how these challenges differ from current server virtualization implementations. He goes on to demonstrate how VDI is but one of several emerging solutions for providing top level IT service delivery. In addition, Halscott looks forward to offer insight on future technologies that will impact your enterprise, and how you can begin planning for those technologies now!

The Essentials Series: Migrating to IPv6

The core protocol of the Internet, IP, is succumbing to the strains of its own success. The commonly used IPv4 protocol is rapidly running out of addresses and stop gap solutions, such as network address translation, are insufficient long term solutions. Business can delay but not avoid the transition to implementing the IPv6 protocol. This Essential Series, authored by IT expert Dan Sullivan, outlines the fundamentals of IPv6, describes migration strategies and discusses management challenges and solutions for migrating to IPv6 networks.

The Essentials Series: Advanced Persistent Threats and Real-Time Threat Management

Businesses face a constantly evolving threat landscape. Malware is becoming more complex, architectural changes create new vulnerabilities, and attackers are willing to focus their efforts on specific companies. The advanced persistent threat (APT) is a term commonly used to describe some combinations of these new threats. Mitigating the risk of APTs requires advances beyond traditional layered security to include real-time threat management. This Essential Series describes the nature of APTs, the risks they pose to businesses and techniques for blocking, detecting, and containing APTs and other emerging threats.

The Essentials Series: Tactics in Optimizing Virtual Machine Disk IOPS

During virtualization's early years, IT focused on processor utilization as a primary bottleneck.Â Today, the experts realize that disk I/O has a far greater impact than ever before realized.Â You probably know that virtual machine performance will suffer when hardware doesn't supply enough disk IOPS.Â But were you aware that VM and virtual environment configurations can have an impact as well?

In The Essentials Series: Tactics in Optimizing Virtual Machine Disk IOPS, author and IT expert Greg Shields shows you how a bad design combined with incorrect VM configurations can be deleterious on performance.Â You'll understand the poor practices that hinder VM disk I/O and how Windows old enemy fragmentation has a significant impact.Â Optimizing your VMs requires doing the same with their disks.Â That's why this ES concludes with a look at the requirements you'll want in your specification for a VM disk optimization solution.

Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment

The IT industry continues to evolve more advanced and efficient tools for troubleshooting operational problems, monitoring operational stability, and improving service response times. However, many organizations are still carrying around decades-old philosophies and processes that hinder true improvement in IT management. In Creating Unified IT Monitoring and Management in Your Environment, IT author and analyst Don Jones examines these outdated processes, and proposes a new set of philosophies and approaches designed to help maintain improved service levels, reduce time to resolution for problems, and increase the communication and cooperation between all levels of the organization â€” both within IT as well as within the organization's larger user community. Told in part through composite case studies, readers will truly find themselves "inside the story," and discover new ways to make IT monitoring and management more effective. Jones brings a practical perspective to his discussion by helping readers to build a realistic "shopping list" for features and capabilities that need to be brought into their environments to realize his proposed process improvements and enhanced approaches.

The Essentials Series: Protecting Client Data in the Cloud: A Channel Perspective

Cloud-based managed services are on the radar of most mid-market companies today, with data backup and disaster recovery a key component. This is good news for the service reseller channels who can expand their portfolios with cloud data protection services, or existing cloud solution providers and managed service providers (MSPs) who want to expand their existing service offerings with backup and recovery services, both at relatively low costs. In The Essentials Series: Protecting Client Data in the Cloud: A Channel Perspective by business technology author and expert Ed Tittel, you will learn how the cloud-based data protection model works. Tittel makes the case to resellers and managed service providers for adding these cloud-based services to their portfolio of service offerings, and even gives tips and recommendations on how to resell these services to potential users.

Protecting Critical Data by Managing the Active Directory Identity Lifecycle

Active Directory has increasingly become THE critical identity store for more organizations. From controlling access to applications, infrastructure and a broad array of systems, to delivering access to common Windows resources, organizations rely on Active Directory to securely manage their data. Given this critical role, it's important to design an Active Directory infrastructure that manages the complete lifecycle of user identity. In Protecting Critical Data by Managing the Active Directory Identity Lifecycle, author and Microsoft MVP Darren Mar-Elia shows you how to design such a well-managed, secure Active Directory infrastructure, offering insight on developing good processes around user provisioning and especially de-provisioning, delegation of Active Directory objects, and auditing of AD-related activities.

The Essentials Series: Streamlining Configuration Management

Network administrators are responsible for critical business infrastructure. Their time is often divided between maintaining existing services, monitoring operations, planning future deployments and addressing the all too common "unexpected" problems. One way for network managers to keep their focus on high value business operations is to automate critical operations such as configuration management. In The Essentials Series: Streamlining Configuration Management, readers will learn about the difficulties that arise when device configurations are inadequately managed, the need for automated discovery of network assets, and the benefits of policy driven, automated configuration management. Readers will also learn how automation can help achieve compliance, detect policy violations, and improve the time and cost of deploying new assets.

PCI Compliance and How SSL Certificates Fit

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Standards were designed to help protect consumers, merchants, and banks from costly fraud due to insufficient security.Â To comply with PCI regulations, those involved with the payment card industry have to implement measures to protect credit card data, such as encrypting credit card data during transmission and locking down servers used in payment processing.Â SSL certificates are used to authenticate servers and enable data encryption. The Shortcut Guide to PCI Compliance and How SSL Certificates Fit provides an overview of PCI regulations, describes the structure and function of SSL certificates and how SSL fits into the compliance picture.Â The final chapter of the guide is a checklist on how to implement SSL certificates and prepare for PCI audits.

White Paper: Archiving Options for the HP E5000 Messaging System for Microsoft Exchange

The growth in messaging presents both business and technical challenges to enterprises of all sizes. Messaging platforms, such as Microsoft Exchange, have become essential business applications as important as financial, order fulfillment, and management reporting applications to the day-to-day functioning of a business. We only need to imagine our Microsoft Exchange servers being unavailable for a day to understand how dependent many of us are on messaging services. As with any complex information systems, messaging services require a broad set of support functions that can challenge the most experienced systems administrators.

From configuring and tuning servers to deploying archiving services, the task of maintaining messaging infrastructure is a demanding, time-consuming process. Requirements will vary from one enterprise to another. The number of mailboxes, the volume of messages transmitted, the configuration of storage, and other considerations affect how we tune Microsoft Exchange servers. Until now, there were significant hurdles to optimally tuning a messaging server, resulting in days of training, documentation review, forum searching, and of course a good bit of trial and error. Today, there is an alternative. HP, in partnership with Microsoft, offers a solution to those challenges with the HP E5000, a converged solution optimized for Microsoft Exchange 2010 running on HP industry-standard servers.

This whitepaper discusses common messaging challenges facing today's enterprises and describes how the HP E5000 provides a comprehensive and flexible platform for meeting the messaging needs of today's enterprise. The paper is organized into four main sections:

Overview of messaging challenges
Archiving: an essential messaging service
Meeting archiving requirements while addressing messaging challenges
Meeting a variety of business requirements with the HP E5000

We conclude with a summary of how the HP E5000 can reduce messaging complexity while maintaining flexibility with regard to archiving architectures and software platforms.

The Essentials Series: Virtualization Backup and Recovery Solutions for the SMB Market

Backup solutions for virtual servers run the gamut from tools designed primarily for physical servers to tightly integrated virtualization-specific solutions. With organizations demanding fast, reliable and affordable backup and recovery, what should a small or medium business look for when selecting a solution?

The SMB Security Series: How to Protect Your Business from Malware, Phishing, and Cybercrime

Not all businesses have the luxury of a dedicated security team that manages endpoint security, monitors networks for malicious traffic, or routinely scans for vulnerabilities. Many rely on a handful of system and application administrators who are equally adept at managing email and database servers as they are soliciting business requirements and training end users. They also know something about security but unfortunately they do not have the time or the resources of cybercriminals. Malware, spam, phishing attacks, and directed hacking attacks are part of everyday life in IT. The SMB Security Series: How to Protect Your Business from Malware, Phishing, and Cybercrime explains the state of malware and cybercrime today and outlines methods for responding to these threats without demanding inordinate amounts of time or expertise.

The Essentials Series: Log Management: Best Practices for Security and Compliance

Every system in an Enterprise IT Infrastructure generates logs of their activity and the data they capture can be a vast source of valuable information to aid in maintaining regulation compliance, responding to a security incident, or as a troubleshooting aid. In order to tap this vast wealth of data it is critical to establish a robust and reliable log file management strategy. In The Essentials Series: Log Management: Best Practices for Security and Compliance by enterprise IT veteran Eric Schmidt, readers will learn the importance of a good log file management strategy and the benefits that it can provide.

Protecting Against Web Application Threats using SSL

Businesses face an increasingly complex set of threats to their Web applications - from malware and advanced persistent threats to disgruntled employees and unintentional data leaks. Although there is no single security measure than can prevent all threats there are some that provide broad-based mitigation to a number of threats. The use of SSL encryption and digital certificate based authentication is one of them. In this shortcut guide, readers will learn how changes in the way we deliver services, the increasing use of mobile devices, the adoption of cloud computing compounded by the ever-evolving means of stealing information and compromising services leave Web applications vulnerable to attack. You will also learn how SSL encryption can protect server to server communications, client devices, cloud resources and other endpoints in order to help prevent the risk of data loss. Readers are provided with a step by step guide to assess their current state of vulnerability, determine where SSL encryption and digital certificate-based authentication is needed, plan for the rollout of SSL to Web applications, and establish policies and procedures to manage the full lifecycle of SSL certificates.

The Essentials Series: HR Outsourcing for SMBs

Since the early 1990s, companies have implemented outsourcing strategies to leverage intellectual capital, decrease fixed costs, and employ a flexible labor source; however, over the past seven years, attention has shifted from outsourcing technology processes to outsourcing business processes. Initially offering transactional, task-oriented services such as payroll, human resources outsourcing companies are now providing services of greater business value in the form of training, employee selection and retention, and strategic planning. Human resources outsourcing is still a relatively new concept for many organizations, resulting in a number of perceived and actual risks; however, if these risks are understood and addressed early on, it can lead to a successful, strategic relationship between the service provider and client. From this Essentials Series by renowned business strategist Crystal Rast, readers will learn about the factors driving companies toward a human resources outsourcing model, the risks and advantages of outsourcing human resources functions and processes, and the approaches available for mitigating risk and ensuring a mutually successful partnership.

Controlling Costs with Managed File Transfer

Data is constantly moving through organizations to business partners and into the cloud. Businesses depend on file transfer methods for day-to-day operations as well as for longer-term planning and analysis. Although file transfers might sound like simple operations, they are not. Network connections fail, data packets are dropped, disks become full, and, perhaps worst of all, ad hoc scripts might not provide adequate error handling and reporting to help you troubleshoot such problems. This Essentials Series outlines the business drivers for using managed file transfer solutions and shows how to improve compliance and application integration while controlling costs.

Best Practices in Virtual and Cloud Management

Virtualization complicates, even as it optimizes. With virtualization having become so popular, itâ€™s time for another look at the best practices in virtual and cloud management. With an eye towards virtualizationâ€™s original value propositions, this guide intends to illuminate the industryâ€™s new best practices, deconstructed into four fundamental activities: performance management, capacity management, compliance management, and workload automation.

Discovering Web Performance Issues Before Your End Users Do

At the end of the day, your site is evaluated by end users through what they see. They stand as judge and jury on whether your site is doing its job. External Web monitoring allows you to quantitatively measure your site in the same context that your end users do. The monitoring tool becomes an advocate of end usersâ€™ vantage point and provides IT with the insight to make that end user experience as good as it can be.

Improving the realized end user experience will build a strong, loyal user community. That community represents your customer, your employees, and your business partners. Their willingness to trust your Web site extends to their ability to trust your organizationâ€™s products and services. Cloud-based Web monitoring can build that community and their level of trust in your organization.

The Essentials Series: Managing Your Virtualized Environment: Migration Tools, Backup and Disaster Recovery

Many organizations implement virtualization to control costs and improve the flexibility and agility of their IT services. Virtualization has allowed organizations to realize significant hardware cost savings while improving agility -- but sometimes at a substantial cost for virtualization platforms. Fortunately, open source virtualization platforms can drive down IT operations costs while reducing the risk of vendor lock-in as well as maintaining needed levels of scalability and reliability. This Essentials Series outlines the business case for adopting open source virtualization, describes steps to migrating to an open source virtualization platform, and discusses how to leverage backup systems for improved operation and disaster recovery.

Collaborative and Agile Project Management

Project management is increasingly difficult as IT project portfolios grow, projects employ multiple technologies, and personnel take on multiple responsibilities. In the past, a single project manager with desktop project management could coordinate a development effort. The complexity of todayâ€™s projects demands more collaboration for success. This Essentials Series provides an outline of project management challenges, dispels myths about conflicts between agile development methodologies and project management, and describes how to move from project management to project execution.

Protecting Data with a Unified Platform

Data is an increasingly valuable asset to businesses, governments, and other organizations; protecting this asset is an increasingly complex challenge. An essential requirement of any data protection operation is to ensure that data can be recovered in the event of accidental loss or intentional destruction.

Protecting the full range of business data can become costly and time consuming unless a unified approach is applied to data protection regardless of platform, data type, or location. This guide outlines the benefits of a unified data protection solution and how a unified approach can be used to protect business data, ensure availability, and streamline business operations.

This guide examines five topics that span the range of issues IT professionals face today with regards to data protection: employing backup, recovery, and data protection; addressing data protection in dynamic environments, ensuring data availability, streamlining data migration; and considering issues with data protection in the cloud.

Implementing Desktop Virtualization

Since the creation of the traditional desktop computer, administrators and end users alike have appreciated the computing power but have been frustrated by the associated expense, complexity, and security issues that result from desktops used in the enterprise. These issues are caused not from lack of investment by the business or lack of effort by administrators but simply by how desktop computers are designed.

There is a better way! This series introduces you to the solution: desktop virtualization. With desktop virtualization, administrators deliver end user desktops as a managed service from the company data center. For those in IT, the thought of offering controlled and reliable services from the data center is a comforting feeling and a solution to the problems with traditional desktops.

The Essentials Series: Securing SharePoint Content

The growing popularity of Microsoft SharePoint should come as no surprise to IT professionals. We have long struggled to help business users capture, organize, and use content. In the past, we might have used shared network drives within a department to enable document sharing within groups, but the increasing use of multiple platforms, including mobile devices, calls for a more Web-oriented approach to collaboration. Microsoft SharePoint not only offers feature rich, Web-based collaboration services but also makes it easy for most users to set up sites and start sharing with minimal hassle. An application that addresses a pressing need and is easy to use is something of a dream come true for IT. There is, however, a dark side to this scenario.

Setting up a secure SharePoint site and maintaining appropriate access controls to content is not a trivial task. Sometimes the path of least resistance to getting a site up and running is to implement few security controls. Even if only some people in the department need access to some of the content, it might be quicker for an inexperienced SharePoint administrator to grant broad access to everyone in the department. This reality is just one example of practices that can undermine SharePoint site security.

This series on protecting and securing SharePoint content examines how to safeguard your SharePoint experience so that you continue to have the benefits of the collaboration tool while mitigating the risk of a security breach.

The Definitive Guide to Cloud Acceleration

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular way to use computing and storage technologies, and it is changing the way businesses deliver services. As with any innovation, you have to adapt your methods and procedures to take full advantage of the new technology. This guide examines how cloud computing and the architecture of the Internet shape service delivery, the challenges presented to reaching a global customer base, and techniques for accelerating content delivery.

Key Considerations for End-User Management

Unless IT can offer the applications that employees need and allow them the workplace mobility they demand, IT will be seen as a barrier to productivity and efficiency. Stop fighting the losing battle with todayâ€™s tech-savvy and mobile workforce. By employing a policy-driven application with streaming data delivery, your company will finally be able to achieve the control you need while giving employees the freedom they demand.

The Essentials Series: Achieving Continuous Data Protection

Protecting data is a fundamental responsibility for IT operations support staff. This task is not easy. Hardware fails and data is lost or corrupted. Security breaches can result in tampering and data leaks. Employees can accidentally delete files. This guide discusses how to improve the ways you protect data, particularly for end users who access and inadvertently delete or overwrite files on network shared drives. This guide introduces the concept of a file server recycle bin to enable continuous data protection and self-service recovery, freeing IT from help desk calls to restore lost files.

The Shortcut Guide to Balancing Storage Costs and Performance with Hybrid Storage

The past several years have witnessed rapid changes in the way IT services are delivered. Virtualization is commonly used to improve the efficiency of both compute and storage services, and the advent of software-defined networking is bringing the benefits of virtualization to network services. A new generation of tools for analyzing large volumes of data are becoming established as common parts of enterprise IT infrastructure. Employees are using their own tablets, smartphones, and laptops for work-related activities, driving the adoption of virtual desktop infrastructure and related services. Although these changes are pushing the established boundaries of different parts of IT operations, they share a common characteristic: These changes place increasing demands on IT service providers to increase levels or application and storage performance or at least maintain existing levels of performance in the face of increasing demand.

The Shortcut Guide to Balancing Storage Costs and Performance with Hybrid Storage is designed to help systems architects, IT managers, and directors understand their options when it comes to deploying flash storage technology in their environment. This guide is divided into four chapters, each of which addresses a relevant aspect of flash technology and hybrid storage.

Maximizing Your Desktop and Application Virtualization Implementation

Article 1: Using Hosted Applications with Desktop Virtualization

With insight into the latest developments in desktop and application management, you can help your company realize the ideal setup for your environment. New desktop and application virtualization solutions are providing administrators the option to support more use cases with both VDI and hosted applications easily and effectively, through a single unified interface.

Article 2: Desktop and Application Virtualization Management Best Practices

The reliability, availability, and performance of your environment depend on the proper time investment, upfront—and the right tools to keep it running smoothly over time. By automating tasks the first time you do them, you won’t have to reproduce them. Although it sounds simple, many administrators never invest their time in this automation and orchestration process. The small investment required for automation will result, in the long term, in much greater efficiency for you, as an administrator, and for your company.

Article 3: Considerations for Implementing Desktop as a Service

The design, purchase, implementation, administration, troubleshooting, and ongoing refresh of VDI environments requires more time and resources than some companies have to invest. Also, some use cases may be better suited for more dynamic deployment mechanisms. More and more, enterprises are considering and making the move to the latest desktop as a service (DaaS) solutions. To realize the greatest success, enterprises must select the right DaaS solution, and this article explores how to do just that.

The Evolving Threat Landscape and the New Best Practices for SSL

Solving the Storage Challenge Across Platforms: Transparent Compression for Windows Operating Systems

Article 1: The Increasing Importance of Compression in the Enterprise

Over the past decade, the amount of data enterprises gather and store has boomed. Many solutions, such as cloud storage and solid-state drive (SSD) technology, have risen to meet the new challenges brought by large volumes of data. However, these solutions are sometimes dismissed due to security or cost concerns. If such is the case for your enterprise, you still have the option of using one storage solution that continues to stand the test of time: data compression.

Article 2: Compression Technologies: Distinguishing Factors

Data compression is an important and well-studied problem. One of the earliest compression algorithms, the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, was invented in the 1970s. These compression algorithms, and others like it, became increasingly important as use of the Internet grew. Compression technologies are now commonly used throughout IT deployments.

Article 3: Guidelines for Evaluating and Selecting a Compression Technology

Finding the right data compression solution is a complex task. There are multiple factors that must be taken into consideration, including platform support, application support, and overall value. In the end, choosing a compression solution involves balancing all factors to find the technology that best suits your operation’s needs.

How the Software-Defined Data Center is Transforming End User Computing

Best Practices for Workload Automation in the Bimodal Era