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Video Conferencing Resuscitates Hospitals' Interpreter Services: San Joaquin General Hospital, French Camp, CA With 60 percent to 70 percent of its patients speaking little or no English, three hospitals pool their interpreters through a VoIP/video conferencing link to improve patient care and boost overall efficiency. By Jim Carr / Jul 12, 2006 WGI Engineers Application Integration Strategy with SOA: A service-oriented architecture that lets Washington Group International unite common practices across its wide range of businesses is the perfect fit for this global engineering, construction and management services firm. Find out what WGI has learned from its integration project. By Kelly Jackson Higgins / Jun 12, 2006 Winemaker Stores No E-Mail Beyond Its Time: Foster's Wine Estates America's new e-mail management system provides the company with archiving to improve storage and access as well as e-discovery to help comply with regulatory audits. By Kelly Jackson Higgins / May 15, 2006 Multimedia Rocks Virgin Entertainment Group's WAN: After a close call with its VoIP traffic at its Times Square location, Virgin is now upgrading the 3 Mbps MultiProtocol Label Switching (MPLS) WAN link at headquarters to 10 Mbps and preparing to add more bandwidth-heavy applications to its MPLS WAN. By Kelly Jackson Higgins / Apr 17, 2006 Centerfold: Extreme Makeover: Virtual Building Edition: Major commercial contractor Webcor Builders is paving the way to virtual building, the next generation of construction technology where every detail of a project is modeled and mapped out virtually before hitting the job site. But adding those heavy files meant major expansions to the company's WAN, SAN and e-mail archiving architectures. By Kelly Jackson Higgins / Mar 27, 2006 Centerfold: Civil Engineering Firm "White Lists" Vulnerable Apps: Application by Invitation Only It's a conservative and labor-intensive way to ward off zero-day attacks, but Patton Harris Rust & Associates decided to go with "white listing" applications each of its users can run. We profile PHR&A's security strategy and the lessons learned in deploying it. By Kelly Jackson Higgins / Feb 21, 2006 Fiber Lets City Go Multimedia: Santa Monica Expands Its Fiber Diet Santa Monica's private CWDM fiber network has paved the way for new traffic-management and videoconferencing apps as well as free public Wi-Fi. Find out how this city is leveraging its fiber infrastructure and tackling roadblocks. By Kelly Jackson Higgins / Jan 24, 2006 Olympic IT Team Seeks Gold Security Standard: Winter Olympics' Security Team Tightens Filters on Alarms The IT security team for the 2006 Winter Olympics learned from the previous Games that they need to filter and correlate their network alarms with more specificity--and that the insider threat is greater than they imagined. By Kelly Jackson Higgins / Nov 14, 2005 Silicon Valley Hospital's RX for Business Continuity: El Camino Taps IT's Best to Prepare for the Worst El Camino Hospital is rolling out an aggressive disaster-recovery strategy with its new backup site in Southern California and a new hospital infrastructure that's seismic-tolerant. By Kelly Jackson Higgins / Oct 18, 2005 Guitar Center's Dual WANs Keep Traffic in Tune: Pilot IP VPN Makes Sweet Music The music equipment retailer, which runs its point-of-sale and inventory traffic on a vintage frame relay WAN, has added a pilot IP VPN with hopes of phasing out the frame relay WAN altogether. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Sep 19, 2005 Calpine Corp. Powers Up Data Logging: Plays It Safe and Stays Ahead of Auditors The power company's infrastructure engineering manager shares his experiences on how the company set up its logging system and how it handles the massive amounts of data. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Sep 6, 2005 Concrete Company Trades Travel for Web Meetings: Bye, Bye Frequent Flier Miles Tindall Corp. needed to reduce travel time and expenses while still encouraging employee collaboration. The solution: Web conferencing, which promises to save the company tons. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Aug 11, 2005 Open Source Pays Off for Nonprofit: FSW FSW, a Connecticut healthcare and social services nonprofit, found that going open source isn't always as simple as plug and play, but it can save lots of money and is often easier to support. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jul 12, 2005 Nancy's Specialty Foods Cooks Up Dual SAN Implementation: Two SANs Are Better Than One We go inside the iSCSI SAN project to see why the gourmet frozen food maker chose IP over Fibre Channel for its storage area network. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jun 13, 2005 Quaker Chemical: Pushing the ERP Envelope A single-instance ERP app provides a new method of distributing data to remote users. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Apr 20, 2005 Appliance Pays Big Dividends for Online Banking App: Spotlight on Security Service Federal Credit Union When the SSFCU's online banking application became increasingly slow and at times unavailable, the credit union decided to boost performance and scalability with a load-balancing solution--the NetScaler 9000 appliance. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Mar 24, 2005 University's New WLAN Cuts Out Uninvited APs: University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine The University of Miami's IT team hopes a new WLAN will eliminate channel interference and tighten security, thereby helping it gain control of the multiplying rogue access points that had been wreaking havoc. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Feb 22, 2005 BrokerageAmerica's Blackout Begets Backup: Fire Speeds Deployment of Redundancy, Backup Plans When a fire gutted the New York brokerage firm's data center and knocked the firm offline, it sparked an initiative to speed up disaster-recovery plans. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jan 27, 2005 Cookson Electronics: Leaving Configuration Management to Your ASP Electronic Materials Manufacturer chose to subscribe to TriActive's Configuration Management Suite service instead of building out its own management platform in-house, thereby saving time and money in helpdesk calls. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Nov 1, 2004 Seed Developer Grows WAN with QoS and Compression: Seminis' WAN Pipe Expansion The produce seed maker and distributor needed to squeeze every last bit out of its multi-site, multi-country WAN pipe without expensive bandwidth upgrades. Discover why the solution grew on the company very quickly. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Oct 5, 2004 Profile: Raymond James Financial: IT Team puts Trust in Layered Security A short outage can mean million-dollar losses for a major financial services company. See how Raymond James Financial's IT staff built a multilayered security fortress to protect both network and VPN. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Sep 3, 2004 Quad/Graphics Embraces SSL: Reconstructing the VPN Printer Quad/Graphics is gradually replacing its vulnerable IPsec VPN with new SSL-based technology, which is more secure and less labor-intensive. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jul 27, 2004 2004 Olympics IT Team Readies Active Defense: Going for Security Gold Find out how lessons learned from the 2002 Winter Olympics helped the Olympic Incident Response Team plan security strategies for the 2004 Summer games. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jul 13, 2004 Pittsburgh International Airport Offers Free Wireless: Free Internet Access Draws Passengers Hoping to bring more business to its hub, Pittsburgh International now offers free wireless access in its terminals. Find out how and why. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jun 14, 2004 Video IP Project Boosts Network's Profile: A Look at Cisco Media Network Streaming video atop the corporate IP backbone saved bundles of cash for Cisco. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Apr 19, 2004 University of Tennessee Implements 802.1x: No WLAN User Left Behind The University's first attempt to secure their WLAN left users without access and their helpdesk beseiged. All that is about to change -- thanks to the emerging 802.1x standard. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Mar 22, 2004 GST Corp: Integrated VPN Keeps GST Truckin' Adding VoIP to its VPN gave Transportation and logistics company GST Corp. a more stable, scalable network at a substantial cost savings. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Feb 23, 2004 Breaking News and Server Gridlock: MediaNews Group' sluggish Web site was turning off readers, which put the publishing company at risk of losing advertisers, too. Fortunately, it traced the problem to a content-management application. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Nov 6, 2003 Southern Co.: A Smarter Storage Strategy: After an accounting server failed during a month-end close--resulting in 30 hours of data recovery--archiving has quickly became the utility company's new mantra. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Oct 9, 2003 If You Rebuild It, They Will Come: The newly reconstructed MLB.com Web site stayed online during the busiest opening day in the site's history, fielding queries from 10 million fans in one day -- the first time in three seasons that it didn't strike out with slowdowns in the season opener. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Aug 12, 2003 UNISYS Wireless Golf Scoring System: Unisys' wireless Golf Scoring System went mobile at this year's U.S. Open. Here's how the company ensures the system's reliability, predictability and performance. By Ron Anderson / Jul 16, 2003 Authentication Gets Into Stanford: Stanford University, fresh off its first installation of firewalls, recently added an extra layer of authentication to its wireless LAN after finding that registering MAC (Media Access Control) addresses left holes in the network. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jun 18, 2003 National Weather Service: Building a Better Forecast Model: The National Weather Service's new graphical forecasting system and relational database are making it easier to predict the weather. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / May 22, 2003 Warehouse Data Earns Its Keep: MasterCard International's technology operation is best known for authorizing, clearing and settling transactions the moment a credit card is swiped. But it's how that information is processed when it reaches their massive data warehouse that helps the credit-card giant make more effective business decisions. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Apr 22, 2003 Wireless IP Video Secures Lots: Wireless surveillance system improves airport's parking-lot security. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Mar 25, 2003 Wireless IP Video Secures Lots: Wireless surveillance system improves airport's parking-lot security. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Mar 25, 2003 : AT&T Enhanced Network Services' monitoring architecture gets to the root of hosting problems. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Feb 26, 2003 App Monitoring Minus False Alarms: Kaiser Permanente is using Heroix's RoboMon software to monitor its applications, ensuring real problems get resolved. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jan 31, 2003 Laying Tracks With Open Source: Union Pacific is building a new generation of intranet and customer applications based on Web technology, with open-source Apache Unix Web servers at the heart of its strategy. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Nov 25, 2002 Making the Vall on VoIP: An unforeseen disaster prompted Lexent to move to VoIP before the scheduled changeover. But the move proved a blessing in disguise. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Nov 12, 2002 T.G.I. Friday's Owner Serves Up an IP SAN: Hospitality firm Carlson Companies is cutting back on fiber and opting instead for an IP SAN. The incentive? Remote storage and backup for its franchises. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Sep 10, 2002 Concentra Health Finds a Cure for Wireless Growth: This health services company recently launched custom applications for physicians and physical therapists in most of its 250 clinics nationwide'but it wasn't a pain-free process. By Kelly Jackson-Higgins / Jul 17, 2002