Because the backups failed, HealthMEDX had to extend its maintenance window to attempt to complete them. That cut into time customers were spending on the company's site to access HealthMEDX software.

The result was a downgrade in network performance for those customers. Bingham says.

"What it cost me was really more reputation," he says. "Performance affects reputation with customers."

On the wireless LAN side, one of the key objectives for HealthMEDX was unifying its wired and WLAN environments to help the company meet the and privacy requirements of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Due to these requirements, HealthMEDX had to ensure that users could access only the parts of the network that were relevant to them. To do this, the company set up virtual WLANs with the Brocade access points and firewalls internally to keep users only on the portions of the network where they are allowed.

Meeting HIPAA-compliant security standards on its wireless network helped HealthMEDX spend less time preventing unauthorized user access and more time on building and deploying new software packages for customers.