Understanding Code-Signing Certificates - New Series Available!
by Don Jones

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.Articles in this series include:Article #1: What are Certificates?Article #2: How Are Certificates Used?Article #3: What’s the Process for Using a Certificate?

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Enhancing Retail Operations with Unified Communications - New Series Available!
by Ken Camp

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.Articles in this series include:Article #1: Framing the Retail Communications ProblemArticle #2: The Retail Challenge - Large and Small ApproachesArticle #3: The Future of Unified Communications in Retail

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Container Virtualization for Linux - New Series Available!
by Greg Shields

Virtualization is a hot topic in today’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 machine’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 you’re considering virtualization for your Linux workloads, this Essentials Series will help you identify alternatives that may provide added benefit.Articles in this series include:Article #1: What is Containers Virtualization?Article #2: Understanding Containers Virtualization’s Management ToolsetArticle #3: Virtual Workloads & Containers Virtualization Performance

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Certificates in the Enterprise - New eBook Available!
by Don Jones

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.Chapters in this excellent new eBook include:Chapter 1: Digital Certificates Crash CourseChapter 2: The Many Faces of Digital CertificatesChapter 3: Trust, Trust, Trust: The Root of a Useful CertificateChapter 4: Certificate “Gotchas” - What You Don’t Know Will Hurt You

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Chapter 3: Automating Change Management in Virtualized Environments
by Greg Shields

This chapter explores the ways in which virtualization and its accompanying automation capabilities can enhance the fulfillment of change management tasks for an enterprise organization. Enterprises that leverage virtualization stand to gain substantial improvements to the fulfillment of processes while easing the process of monitoring and managing change over time.

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Enhancing IT Administration with Run Book Automation - New Series Available!
by Greg Shields

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.Articles in this series include:Article #1: Understanding Run Book Automation for WindowsArticle #2: The Power of Automated Systems AdministrationArticle #3: The Power of Automated User Administration

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The Evolving Landscape of Enterprise Data Protection - New Series Available!
by Dan Sullivan

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.Articles in this excellent new series include:Article #1: Lowering Costs of Data Protection through Deduplication and Data ReductionArticle #2: Virtual Machine Environments: Data Protection and Recovery SolutionsArticle #3: Leveraging Your Existing Infrastructure for Enterprise Data Protection

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Selecting the Right Network Threat Management Solution - New Series Available!
by Dan Sullivan

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.Articles in this series include:Article #1: Hidden Costs of Off the Shelf Security ProductsArticle #2: Proper Security Management Enables Operational EfficiencyArticle #3: Intrusion Prevention Evaluations and the Perils of Checkbox Product Comparisons

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