When it comes to terms like ethical hacking, many may see this as an oxymoron. Ethical hacking is one approach to examining the security of your network in the same way that an attacker would. The difference is that is it done without malice and with the permission of the company.

Cisco Specialist certifications help professionals hone their areas of expertise and technology. Here’s a look at the Security and Voice specialization certifications.

When designing and deploying security solutions, a thorough understanding of what you have to protect is important. Just as important is understanding the vulnerabilities within and around your assets and infrastructure. A threat analysis considers the range of currently known threats and the potential and likelihood that an attack will be attempted against your organization. Do you know what’s coming at you?

I’ve been to Las Vegas before when I attended Cisco Live 2011, but this is my first time attending the Interop IT Expo and Conference. Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, and Interop — what a combo.

Like the majority of folks attending, as we walk by the slot machines, craps tables, and roulette wheels, I’m looking forward to learning more about emerging IT topics such as cloud computing and virtualization, data center and storage, and wireless and mobility, as well as security and risk management.

Which of the following provide high availability and performance enhancements for VPN sessions?

Whether one calls it Consumerization or the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) era, it has clearly begun in earnest. The availability of 4G phones, tablets, hot spots, and their usage are expanding at amazing rates. Now is a good time to look at the challenges and opportunities of BYOD. Here are 12 areas that deserve careful consideration.

Tablets are apparently the future of computing  –  versatile, lightweight, truly portable, and crucially, cool. It seems though that Microsoft is not falling for the marketing hype.

They have instead allowed one of their Applied Science teams to invest some serious time and effort into developing an entirely new way of interacting with computers. If you are reading this on a desktop or laptop computer, you will have your keyboard at the front, mouse to the side and 2D screen at the back. Not for much longer though.

In order to protect your assets, you must first know what they are, where they are, and understand how they are tracked and managed. Are they secured? Who has access to them? Who tracks and manages them? Do you have functional procedures in place to respond and recover from a security breach quickly? Do you have a process improvement cycle to prevent re-occurrence?

So far we covered Cisco Foundation certifications, Design and Security certifications, and Unified Communications and Wireless certifications. Last week we looked at Routing & Switching and Storage, so now we’ll go over Service Provider Certifications.

I attended the HDI conference in Orlando this week briefly to give a presentation on common cloud support issues and how some organizations respond with effective knowledge management processes.

My presentation was at 7:30 AM on Thursday morning. I had low expectations for the number of attendees, but I was pleasantly surprised. The rather large room was mostly full. People are interested in hearing what cloud-related incidents other organizations see as well as how organizations are handling those incidents.