Microsoft Windows has been at the forefront of enterprise computing for several decades. What most office workers see is the desktop side – such as Windows 7, 8 or 10. This course explores what it takes to design and build the server side of Windows in an enterprise environment. This course will explore everything from Windows Server installation to configuring users, to hardening the server operating system itself. This course is the second course in the System Management and Security Specialization focusing on enterprise system management. The first week of this course provides an overview of how Windows operates in an enterprise environment and what it may look like in the real world. Week 2 of the course will show you how Windows users interact with the system. At the end of Week 2, you will be able to demonstrate how Windows authentication works at the end of Week 2. Week 3 will explore authorization in a Windows environment. At the end of Week 3, you will be able to differentiate between different authorization mechanisms and use different technologies to secure data within the environment. Week 4 explores built in security features of Windows and demonstrates how to use each technology effectively and in what circumstances you would use what technology for what purpose. At the end of week 4, you will be able to determine which technology is the best technology to use to secure certain portions of the Windows operating system.
About the Instructor
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From the course by University of Colorado System
Windows Server Management and Security
39 ratings
University of Colorado System
39 ratings
Course 2 of 4 in the Specialization Computer Security and Systems Management
From the lesson
Introduction to practical Windows system management
In this module we'll discuss how Windows is used in an enterprise setting.
Meet the Instructors
Greg WilliamsLecturer
Department of Computer Science
Hi everyone. My name is Greg Williams,
I'm a lecturer in
the computer science department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs.
I wanted to introduce you to myself for a few minutes,
and tell you a little bit about these courses that you're going to be taking,
and my passions in computers.
My passion in computers really started back in the 80s
where my parents changed my dad's computer.
It was running DOS at the time.
I choose the time on it because he couldn't figure it out.
So then, in high school started taking some C Programming classes.
And then in college, my undergrad,
I got my Information Technology degree
and then got my Masters in Engineering and Information Assurance.
That's a computer science degree.
My passions in computer security are really
identifying malicious content and helping identify it faster.
My thesis was on identifying
internal data breaches from external networks.
The paper was actually called,
External Detection for Internal Data Breaches. That's what it was.
Anyway, going back to where I came from in security,
I still do love playing video games.
And back in the early 2000s,
me and my friends would play Battlefield 1942,
and there was a Desert Siege Mod that came out.
And I would rewrite the memory locations on
the fly to turn on the enemies a different colors so I could identify them easier.
So yes, I was a hacker back then.
But that really started me into my computer security career
because I was able to see that other people,
like myself, had an advantage and how do I stop other people from gaining that advantage.
So now, I still play video games all the time.
Love playing first person shooters like Battlefield.
Within the past week, I played Battlefield 1 and Battlefield 4, and played Diablo,
all kinds of different games.
I do play games with my students occasionally.
So if send me your gamertag, after the course,
that is, after you've completed it,
then we'll set up a channel or something like that.
So I've been the information security officer here at the university and the head of
security officer but my passion now is being able
to apply computer security into the systems that I manage,
so being the director of operations, which includes telecom.
It includes all networking.
It includes infrastructure for a,
what we would call medium sized university,
which is 13,000 students.
It gets me the opportunity to innovate again.
We're doing some really cool things.
So, I'm going to take you into the data center right now.
We're going to just look over a few of the things that get me really
excited about computer security and also system management.
But before we do that,
what I want you to understand is
that everything that you're going to learn in these courses,
if you're just taking the system management
and security specialization or if you're taking
the computer security or the practical computer security specialization,
what I want you to understand is that this
is practical knowledge that I've had from years of experience.
I live and breathe this stuff every day.
You're going to walk into the data center here in a second
and see that this stuff really does exist.
This is really what I'm putting into practice, not just theory.
My teams live and breathe this stuff too.
So it's a combination of learning all the time, but also practicing.
And I hope that you see that throughout these classes.
Let's go take a look at the data center.
Okay, this is our primary data center.
We have a raised floor system here.
Underneath the floor is 24 inches of space.
What that does is that allows cold air from the crack units behind
me here to be pushed down through the floor and cold air going up.
What that does is that pushes the hot air up to the ceiling.
The ceiling in this room is around 17 feet tall,
but you can't tell because of the tiles.
We have quite a few standalone servers.
But let's take you into where we have a lot of rack mount units.
This is one of our newer racks.
Each one of the racks here
contains almost half a million dollars worth of IT equipment in it.
Very specialized hardware and software that
goes into everything that we do here at the university.
Systems like these run,
and these down here run our media departments servers and they store video on them.
Standalone servers for random things.
This is our SDN stack, software-defined networking.
This is one of the really cool bleeding edge or
cutting edge technologies that is out on the market today.
It's actually Cisco ACI.
What it does is that it works with virtualization and physical systems to software,
well, based on the software,
route packets back and forth and do micro-segmentation on the network.
It's actually the core of our network,
not which many universities have at the moment,
or really not many organizations.
Down at the bottom,
we have some of our virtualization architecture.
We have storage in this cabinet.
Like I said in the previous couple of minutes ago,
this is just our primary data center.
We have four data centers on campus.
Some have more equipment in them, some have less.
We also have 54 buildings on campus.
Each one of them look around like this.
This is our networking row.
Each one of these racks or each one of
these red wires goes to a port somewhere in the building.
Orange wires go directly to servers,
or rather internal architecture.
This is our core router.
Each one of these in here go to a building.
Each building on campus is dual connected,
meaning that if somebody cuts one of the fibers,
the other one kicks in.
And here's all the connections to our buildings on campus.
We have more standalone servers and network architecture in the back and then even more.
We could keep on going.
But, what I want you to understand out of the entire course,
as you're thinking about these videos and
you're watching these lectures and doing the work,
think about how you are implementing
this technology or how you want to learn this technology for an organization.
Feel free to email me,
I'll be more than happy to take a look at whatever you have and help you out if I can.
Keep in mind, I practice this stuff on a daily basis.
This isn't just me talking theory.
Most of the stuff that we talk about is from
situations that we've had here on campus or lessons learned.
So, I will see you in the next couple of weeks.
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