Are they worth it?

Regarding “Are Cisco switches really so expensive?”: Classic pandering to Cisco. The argument that says the relatively high availability of Cisco skills in the marketplace reduces total cost of ownership is as false as “you never get fired for buying Cisco.” Manufacturers who didn't build their product lines by hundreds of acquisitions have few OS/CLI variations, if any, and therefore training is absolutely minimal. You also gain the benefit of simpler AMCs and less upgrades, memory adds, and so on.

Will Bell
London

ITIL do

Regarding “Survey: ITIL’s ROI hard to measure”: I find this article kind of ironic. ITIL has good principles and excellent merit, but ITIL cannot be done effectively without baselining and effective machine-to-personnel transitions of information. In effect, if you do not have good correlation, incident management becomes a wash. And if your correlation is not customizable, you are now stuck with some vendors idea of how you should respond to given incidents.

Douglas Stevenson
Austin, Texas

Lock up your data

Regarding “Content filtering to protect intellectual property”: What is the matter with these people? If you have very sensitive data, why are you keeping it on a connected or accessible computer? Keep this stuff in a vault just like a bank does. Why do you think banks have vaults -- for the fun of it? No, it's for security. Computers are like a colander -- they have holes (ports) all over them. Keep your secure information locked up.

Robert Bryant
President and CEO
Atomic Systems
Exton, Pa.

Broadband router realities

I enjoyed Kevin Tolly’s column on broadband router throughput and found it, unfortunately, quite true to my own experiences. Reliability might make a good topic for a future column. I have used Linksys for my home office for many years and have scrupulously kept my firmware up to date. Unfortunately, either the hardware or the firmware has a problem Linksys does not acknowledge and will not do anything about. Fairly frequently (once or twice a day sometimes), I need to power-cycle the router to get an Internet connection through my cable modem. For whatever reason, the router just hangs up. Linksys support has sent me revised setup instructions for Comcast cable installations and I have gone through the pain of resetting all the parameters and port configurations, but it didn’t help. I even keep the router away from equipment generating heat just in case.

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