Oregon's capital city of Salem is located midway between Portland and Eugene in the middle of the Willamette Valley. Next to Pringle Creek Park sits the 450-bed Salem Hospital, a not-for-profit acute care facility and the city's largest employer, with 500 physicians and 3,300 total employees.

But just as the banks of Pringle Creek are crowded with larches, mulberries, and Douglas firs, the IS department at Salem Hospital had accumulated a hodgepodge of more than a half-dozen incompatible firewalls from an assortment of vendors and free/open-source projects. The acquisition of each security device seemed cheap at the time, but the end result has been undue complexity and high administrative costs for the staff of five network engineers.

By Victor Cruz at Linux Journal.

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