CompTIA IT Pro Mentor Best Practices & Research

Find research and articles from CompTIA and IT Pro mentors. The best practice section was designed to help you think about how you can improve IT operations and security. You can get the latest news and articles IT Pro Mentors find valuable to the IT community.

VoIP Challenges & Drivers (article submitted by Mark Zuber IT Pro Mentor)

One of my roles as Telecommunications Specialist I feel is to (and ensure that others) face the challenges of the coming years with respect to voice services.  Some of these topics are….

• Evaluate the current state of the life span of our PBX's and any migration strategies to VoIP that may be available for our platform.  As a Fujitsu user, Kirkwood has a manufacture discontinued PBX.  Our choice has to be carefully made as to minimize the difficulty of transition and impact on our users and service areas.

• Traditional TDM based PBX's supply power to the phones centrally.  In turn, central UPS support is provided. VoIP introduces a distributed model that will be harder to manage.  So we will ask ourselves, "How long do we support service in the distributed communications closets in the event of lost power?"  This will determine UPS size and cost.

• Be sure that auxiliary services based from the traditional PBX that are purchased today will be useful to our new VoIP platforms tomorrow.  Examples might be Voice Mail, IVR (interactive voice response), or Fax servers.

• How much analog telephone service do we provide today?  Determining this percentage is an indication of both how feature dependent our users are and cost of replacement as VoIP phones are still quite expensive compared to POTS(plain old telephone service) phones.  Analog gateways can also be an expensive to prolong the debate.

• How much can we benefit from Mobility features on a VoIP system?  Moves, Adds, and Changes also have been promised to be easier on a VoIP system.  Are these reasonable justifications to move sooner?

Sharing these challenging questions or any others that you face, moves you from isolation to a place where help and collaboration can begin.  Also, large future expenditures can be planed for in this way.  Be confident that your organization wants you to be successful and contribute collaboratively to achieve higher level goals for the greater good.

Read what our IT Pro Member Mark Zuber has to say in the January issue of Voice Report.  "77% plan to have UM by 2010" page 5
Voice Report - The Independent Source of News and Best Practices for Communications Technology Professionals

Hardware Virtualization (article submitted by Julian Cordle IT Pro Mentor)
An overview of the "Hardware Virtualization" concept - what it is, why it is used and the benefits to an organization.

IT Pro Mentor Julian Cordle Comments:
Virtualization is a relatively new concept to the IT industry. Its benefits are many, and this technology isn't just for IT shops with racks and racks of servers, either. Great news for those who've heard about it and want to learn more (and gain the skills to effectively bring the technology to your company): for testing and trial purposes, Virtualization scenarios are easy to implement (find any unused PC, or setup a "virtual server" on your own PC with minimal impact), and use any number of the available tools out there (Microsoft Virtual PC, VMWare Workstation) to try it out yourself for free.

Mentor Article: Using Patch Management Systems and Vulnerability Scanners for Assessing and Verifying Information Security Vulnerabilities
By: William P. Flinn
May 16, 2007

Find vulnerabilities on the computers on your network; apply a patch, and all done, right? Well, maybe, and maybe not. Part of any good security program includes using a variety of tools to assess the risks in your environment. Specifically, I am talking about the periodic vulnerability assessments that are performed on the desktop and server computers in your network. …

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What does it take to lead in the IT industry? (article submitted by Julian Cordle IT Pro Mentor)
An overview of the "Hardware Virtualization" concept - what it is, why it is used and the benefits to an organization.

IT Pro Mentor Julian Cordle Comments:
Leadership in the world of IT is tricky: typical IT personnel are strong in their technical opinions, yet find it difficult to convey ideas, concepts and have trouble convincing others when it comes to open discussion. How does one lead others in this environment, especially if there are fuzzy areas of responsibility or if the decision-makers don't have "manager" or "supervisor" in their title? (See #2 in the article for that answer).