Helpful Book: Practical Cisco Unified Communications Security by Brett Hall and Nik Smith

Offered by Cisco Press, this book takes you to a profound grasp of modern Cisco Unified Communications aspects. It reinforces your knowledge in environments that make use of different real-time collaboration features such as video, voice, meetings, and messaging. These capabilities are grounded on mobile or remote access as well as mobile devices that are based on BYOD.

There’s also a scope expounding the effective methods of handling collaboration security. This material walks you through the process of securing each attack surface in an efficient and logical progression. Another significant section explicated in the book is Cisco collaboration architecture. It mainly discloses the modern features of Cisco Meeting Server, Expressway, encryption, and complex B2B collaboration. More so, the authors follow the Explain, Demonstrate, Verify approach, making the content more coherent and easy to understand. Trailing this methodology starts with explaining a threat, then demonstrating the right remediation, and lastly showing the correct implementation. And to get a better grip of the topics, each chapter comes with an outline of the areas as well as detailed links for simpler reference.

Corresponding Certification Paths

Cisco 300-825 is an area-focused exam that is associated with the Cisco Certified Specialist – Collaboration Conferencing Implementation certification. Along with that, it is one of the concentration tests for the CCNP Collaboration certificate, which is given to successful candidates who have established their expertise in collaboration solutions and have passed 350-801 CLCOR as well. Henceforth, the most recommended applicants for this test are deployment engineers, network engineers, and sales engineers.

Reference: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/training-events/training-certifications/exams/current-list/clcnf-300-825.html

Preparation Process

To succeed in the 300-825 exam, it is highly recommended to have thorough preparation. For this purpose, Cisco offers to take the Implementing Cisco Collaboration Conferencing course. This training provides the students with the theoretical lessons and hands-on labs to prepare for the test. The course will give you all the required information regarding Cisco on-premises conferencing solutions and architecture. The applicants will get the knowledge and skills in implementing and designing the processes required for the basic conferencing deployment scenarios of Cisco Meeting Server. It also includes its incorporation with the call control features, including Cisco Expressway & Cisco Unified Communications Manager. The candidates can take this training as the instructor-led option or in the e-learning format. All in all, they will have 5 days of education with the hands-on lab practice. Besides that, the individuals can read Practical Cisco Unified Communications Security, written by Nik Smith and Brett Hall. This book is full of information about the effective methods of managing collaboration security.

Configuration & Installation

In the framework of this topic, which covers 30% of the overall content, the applicants have to prove their skills in the following processes:

• Configuring Cisco Expressway and CMS for external WebRTC access;
• Describing the TLS certificate requirements within CMS;
• Installing Cisco Meeting Server;
• Configuring scalable & resilient as well as single combined CMS deployment;
• Deploying & configuring Cisco Meeting Management.
• Determining the CMS deployment most suitable within a single combined meeting server, resilient & scalable meeting server, single split meeting deployment, or Cisco Expressway Web Proxy;
• Configuring CMS for recording as well as streaming;